take clothes for instance BOOK

take
clothes
for
instance…
Notes from the journal by Richard Hall

take
clothes
for
instance…
Notes from the journal by Richard Hall

INTRODUCTION
My initial response in having to collaborate on a project was
dread and my reflex was to turn around, and walk away. But as I’d
committed to the programme this was out of the question.
However I then felt trapped as I’d have to see it out to the end,
and this exacerbated my anxiety which manifested itself in a
physical churning sensation in my stomach and tightness in my
chest.
The project meant I would be relinquishing a lot of control in
allowing many of my collaborations to guide and direct my
decision making. These could be people, things, spaces; in effect
any resource which I either sought out or which came to me
through my study, or indeed by sheer accident. The idea of these
things having agency to influence the direction of my journey was
on the one hand an exciting prospect with many potential “What
if” moments that would take its development to unexpected new
places, but on the other hand the thought that these things
might dictate an outcome which could very well end in disaster
rested uncomfortably with me.
Another aspect which unsettled me was that as a returning
student and after many years of working outside of an academic
institution I had re-entered a realm which I felt unsure of and
therefore ill at ease with fellow artists who I felt probably had a
better knowledge of contemporary practice, with clearer
expectations of the learning landscape than I had.
I could very well have been imagining this though as I may have
been projecting a scenario which had little foundation in reality. I
was therefore determined to work against these feelings.
However despite endeavouring to act on this assumption, I still
felt out of place and deeply insecure.

AN ILL FIT
As I was casting about for subjects to depict this feeling of
awkwardness began to emerge as the foundation of my project.
I started to focus my attention on other instances where I had felt
as uncomfortable as this, and I began to consider this lack of
comfort, this state of fragility, of feeling misshapen and not
fitting, and of the fear of being exposed or revealed as akin to
wearing ill-fitting clothes.
This experience shared by all of us, the very clothes on our backs,
if pulled out of shape could give us a sense that the shape of our
own identities had also been misshapen.
OUTSIDE OF A COMFORT ZONE
I’d had numerous conversations with acquaintances in the past
who’d described situations where they had worn clothes
inappropriate for an occasion like a wedding, or for work, and
they’d expressed feelings of embarrassment and shame for their
bad choice of apparel, particularly whilst in sight of others. At
other times they’d recalled the ill fit of the clothing which might
have been too short or tight, may have ridden up or dropped
down, may even have fallen off. Their bodies may have been
pressed into clothing which made them feel misshapen, feeding
back to them a distorted sense of themselves, and of how they
feared others might scrutinise them. I could also recall numerous
occasions when my own clothing had this effect of putting me in
an uneasy state of mind. As a consequence this had a
destabilising effect on my confidence.
It seems that ill-fitting clothing can invoke a high degree of affect.
The way people feel about themselves and others, although it’s
often subliminal, that it falls under the radar of consciousness, is
still nonetheless felt in a deep and visceral way. It places people
in a state of dis-ease, a state sometimes so uncomfortable that it
feels akin to an illness. The definition of the word sums this up:
Dis-ease
early 14c., “discomfort, inconvenience,” from Old French desaise “lack, want; discomfort,
distress; trouble, misfortune; disease, sickness,” from des- “without, away” (see dis-) +
aise “ease” (see ease). Sense of “sickness, illness” in English first recorded late 14c.; the
word still sometimes was used in its literal sense early 17c.

CONSTRUCTED IDENTITIES
I also considered the societal aspects of clothing and looked
at the way in which people are evaluated by what they wear,
and status and gender are key elements in peoples’ weighing
up one another. These are socially constructed identities
reflecting the views of groups and individuals to our
respective identities. They are reinforced in the social context
through continual re-enactment.
CLOTHES AS DEPICTED IN MASS
MEDIATION
In the 1960s Values and Lifestyles (VALS) models began to be
used by advertising and marketing companies to help them
identify social and character types in order to persuade people
into purchasing commodities on the basis that these products
would enhance their personalities.
Clothes are often perceived as extensions of a person’s
personality or identity. We are encouraged to think this through
these mediating messages from advertising and public relations
organisations who wish us to think of our brighter better selves
tomorrow through purchasing these commodities which will
imbue us with a sense of us as our better future selves. The flip
side of this is that we are also encouraged to think we are
deficient in our present states, lacking the potential that we could
have unless we bought these commodities, and thus buying into
the idea that clothes might be a palliative to ward of feelings of
inadequacy.
The manner in which the sale of clothes is mediated in
advertising allows for a performative dialogue between the
viewer and the clothing they view. There is a complicity in this
discourse, but advertising is often subliminal in its persuasiveness
and it could be argued that it disables the agency of the viewer
when they are subjected to advertising messages.
VALS (Values and Lifestyles) models
http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/ustypes.shtml

THE HUMAN CONDITION SEEMS TO BE ONE OF FRAGILITY
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that for the vast majority of the
population you only had to turn a bed upside down with the
person sleeping in it in the night for them to wake up in the
morning thinking the world had been turned upside down.
The human condition is a fragile one. By this I mean that people’s
perceptions of themselves can be threatened and upset easily. I
have watched fly on the wall documentaries which places an
individual outside of their usual comfortable context and places
them in unfamiliar surroundings. (Wife Swap for instance takes
one spouse from a family and places them in another
household). Often the participant feels threatened and will lash
out against their unfamiliar situation. We seem to have a natural
reluctance then to place ourselves outside of the familiar
constructs which we have either formed around ourselves, or
have been formed around us by a family or our greater social
network. These we feel are right, whilst other situations feel
deeply wrong.
The idea of the “looking glass self,” which is attributed to Charles
Horton Cooley (1902), that others whose views we hold in
esteem constitute social mirrors that reflect an image of our own
self. Shrauger and Schoeneman (1979) refined Cooley’s thinking
through a review study which failed to find a link between
peoples’ self-evaluations and actual evaluations of them by
others, but which did find a very significant relationship between
evaluations of the self and the imagined evaluations of others.
Without this familiar social mirror therefore we become insecure
and even antagonistic towards people and situations which seem
uncomfortable to us.
My contention is that we behave in the same way towards
clothes. With things having to be just so, clothes are an important
aspect of us maintaining our boundaries and our identity, our
sense of ourselves and the side we wish to show to others.

The idea of peoples’ clothes being a representation of
their identity appealed to me as a subject and I began
to think of identities as designed and constructed to be
the thing we wished others to see us as. However to
me these designed constructions really resembled a
montage of bits and pieces which were put together in
order to make us appear to be unified. My idea was to
deconstruct clothes worn by someone in order to
address this idea of identity, and because these clothes
would also not fit to create a problem for the person
who would invariably struggle with these clothes.

In my search for other artists who’d used clothes I looked at Yoko
Ono’s “Cut Piece”. The focus of my interest was that the work was
performative insomuch that in cutting off parts of her clothing
the audience participating would be implicated by their act and
they would be confronted by their own responses to attitudes
implicit in violent undress and nudity in a public forum.
I also looked at “Touch Cinema” by Valie Export. The significance
of allowing men to fondle her breasts in a public space albeit with
her breast concealed in a box confronted social attitudes to acts
which would have normally have been conducted privately.
I was aware that ill-fitting clothing and states of undress might
also look farcical and was reminded of the Warner Bros. cartoon
“Tick Tock Tuckered.” The animation begins with Daffy Duck and
Porky Pig who have ignored their alarm call and are late for work
racing to put their clothes on and getting tied in knots.

INITIAL PLAN
My initial plan to approach to the subject of ill-fitting clothing
was to photograph people wearing some and in order to do this I
would need a subject. In the planning of this I felt it necessary to
come prepared with a list of items of apparel as well a list of ways
in which the subjects should wear these. Examples might be:
• Underwear worn on the outside of clothes
• Socks over shoes
• Clothes worn inside out and back to front
I would ask my subjects to dress according to some of the
conditions highlighted in the list, although I also did not want the
situations my subjects found themselves in to dictate what they
decided they would do. If I was photographing more than one
subject I would encourage them to interact in helping each other
with the clothing. Because this photo session would be
experimental I could not be sure of the outcome and I decided to
take time afterwards to analyse the results and record my
observations and insights in my journal.
• Children’s clothes worn by adults/adults clothes worn by
children
• Ill-fitting clothing which is too tight or too loose
• Clothes too short or long
• Women’s clothes on men, men’s clothes on women.

ON THE VERGE OF MY FIRST PHOTO-SHOOT
For part of the process of the project’s development the group I
was in held tutorials to discuss each other ideas. I received some
critical comments in this early tutorial which I’ve highlighted
below:
There was a view expressed that the types of clothing conditions I
mentioned were poor derivations from the work on gender like
Lee Bowery for instance, and that in some manner not only had
this been done before but that I was doing this in a crass fashion.
The observation was that by placing underwear over clothes this
had been done with greater insight than my poor ill-conceived
efforts. Although I acknowledged this criticism I felt that the
comments were given too soon and sharply and that my ideas
were still at an early developmental stage and could very well
change.
These were starting points from which to reference but depart
from, and that the nature of the exercise I was intending to carry
out was to be experimental. The manner of the approach I was
intending was that I wanted the clothes and my subjects to act as
collaborators and that I would be entering into a dialog with
them without coming to any conclusions beforehand. Both my
subjects and the apparel would, as it were speak back to me. I
would allow myself to be influenced by these interactions and in
doing so it would then give me the opportunity to reflect on new,
possibly novel approaches both to the process and to the
outcome.
Some early test photographs I had intended to use as a starting
point in discussing my project came in for some criticism. These
were perceived as the type of objectification present in police
mug-shots. When I’d taken these images I had not had time to
properly appraise this aspect of their composition, though I was
familiar with criminal, medical and anthropological pictures.

EARLY TEST PHOTOGRAPHS

I could look at objectification in another way. By focussing on the
details, the folds and creases, buttons and openings, stitching and
pleating, the forms and textures of materials and how they
interact with the human body. Seeing the person in those terms,
especially in the montaged manner I was intending to portray
them could be construed as a form of objectification. However in
the manner in I wished to portray them, much like a Dada
montage I wanted to throw open the meaning of relationships to
clothing and the wearer to new interpretations.
Though I was really not sure where this project was going my
intention all along was to act experimentally with the working
assumption that my collaborations would feed back to me the
direction towards some kind of meaning involving the
relationship between people and their clothes.
world, a world where people felt they needed to fit in and stand
out in varying measures, and that my exploration of re-montaging
these conditions was intended to look at the fragility of this state.
Through these initial explorations into the photographs I would
ultimately take, my partner Freya collaborated in testing some of
the ideas by posing with ill-fitting clothes. What emerged give me
new areas for thought, research and experimentation.
Many of us are dependent on these props to convey ourselves to
the world. Without these outward portrayals who exactly are we?
Our self-protection against the misconstrued views of others and
our sense of our own narrative is confused if not lost.
However some thoughts at this point seemed to be adhering to
the project and vulnerability was one of these. I began to think of
clothes as armour which protected the wearer from the outside

Reflecting on these initial photographs I had been cultivating the
idea that people were montaged identities through the clothes
they chose to wear. There seemed to be a need for the wearer of
clothes to project the notion that their clothed appearance had a
seamless integrity, a style as it were, and in achieving this state of
appearance it reflected who they were as people.
However, our clothes are a bricolage of collected items of apparel
and ideas about appearance imbued with cultural messages of
who we portray we feel we are to others. This though can so
often become miss-matched. As such the conceit is unveiled, the
game is up. We are revealed for who we are, (if we can ever
actually know who we are); not purposeful, independently minded
strong individual of enviable status, but people whose
vulnerabilities and insecurities make us fragile, insecure and
imperfect; less than we would wish to be.

ON EDGAR DEGAS
On returning to this uncomfortable awkward state I’d felt at the
beginning of the project it struck me that Edgar Degas seemed to
be touching on this same theme in many of his drawing and
painting of dancers.
Degas’ depictions of his subjects I’d always been attracted to
because they are involved in the bones of what they do. Sitters sit
awkwardly; dancers are depicted in ungainly in-between states as
they adjust their postures or the straps of their apparel. They are
involved in the mechanics of work and this is no outer show, no
show for an audience. The effort this takes means they are often
seen stretching their bodies at odd angles into effortful and
ungraceful distortions.

TESTING, THOUGHTS, CONCEPTS AND PROPOSAL
The set-up of the photo-shoot was limited. There were time
constraints and few clothes to utilise. Despite calling around for
volunteers I’d also been unable to get the collaboration I needed
and was limited to the help given by Freya and her daughter.
There was an advantage to this as they were already familiar with
me which meant that there was a degree of trust already built up
which made collaboration easier. However I would also have liked
to have had a male volunteer as this would have changed the
gender dynamics. I carried out the photo-shoot in the front room
of my house against a plain wall as I wanted to isolate the
subjects from any other distractions. The lighting conditions, a
window letting in light from the left hand side allowed me to take
photos of my subjects which portrayed clearly delineated form.
The diffuse sunlight in the late afternoon caused form to be more
softly contrasted. There was a constant dialogue between my
subjects and I as well as a negotiation with the clothing. My
condition was that they should make the clothing difficult to use,
awkward to put on or take off, to twist and invert the clothing, to
pull and push, and to generally find conditions which made it
difficult to wear. I negotiated scenarios with my subjects, and
they negotiated between each other and the rag tag of clothes.
The images I captured of the two working together and against
each other were of the most interest to me as there was a
greater interaction between them and the clothing as well as
resistance to it. In this there was a performative aspect which I
felt I could focus on in the next photo-session.
Despite the set-up being an artificial one I was looking for
unpredictable things to happen, and for reactions of surprise
from my subjects which would alter what they did and be
revealed in the photographs. This in fact did occur which I think
was largely due to their close relationship and meant that they
could push each other around with a deep knowledge of each
other’s tolerances.

1 ST PHOTO-SHOOT IMAGES

1 ST PHOTO-SHOOT IMAGES

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ON PEOPLE’S RELATIONSHIPS TO PHOTOGRAPHS
RESPONSES TO THE 1 ST PHOTO-SHOOT
The position and focal view of the camera was important to me. I
wanted to take details as well have half body shots of my
subjects. With these I could focus on details better in a closer and
more intimate way. Expression and posture would be closer, as
would details such as buttons, zips, folds, creases and textures
etc. This I think would help me define what it was I was looking
for. Although I had only limited success with this, partly due to
time constraints leading me not to formulate my thinking in this
area as much as I would have liked to, I felt that this would be a
good approach to take forward in exploring the montage effects I
described.
However it was the full figure shots that gave me the most to
think about. There was an odd formality and distance to them,
despite the often looser manner of their posings. It reminded me
a little of the tableaux arrangements of portraiture that appeared
in the late 19th Century, the stiff and awkward nature of the
people who posed and the unnatural conditions in which they
posed. The composing of the subjects prior to the picture being
taken and the time people had to wait stiffly while the shutter
remained open for the image to be captured. Quite often the
relaxed and naturalistic stance of the subjects would slide,
postures would tighten to compensate for feeling uncomfortable,
and expressions would drop or harden.
The counter-posing of my two subjects together oddly
epitomised these types of photographs because the set up and
conditions of a Photography session was similar to these early
formal portraits.
And then I began to think about the reasons why
people have their photos taken…

The photographic process is one where the camera takes a picture of a
moment in time. It is temporal, and yet those posing for photographs
often want a picture to immortalise them in some way; to capture who
they think they should be. There is a peculiar contradiction in these
two things: One of the moment, and the other captured for all time.
And yet so often these pictures of ourselves are less than we would
wish them to be. In our attempt to capture the best picture of
ourselves we fall short of that ideal picture, that picture which
immortalises us. This is as much the case now as it was in the past
before the mass digital imagery explosion of back facing cameras on
smartphones.

In old portrait photographs people would often slip from
appearing composed, they’d stiffened to prevent their bodies
from collapsing in on themselves, from causing discomfort and
even pain. The effect was a rictus appearance with the subjects
looking like stiff ill postured dolls. In contemporary photographs,
although they are often taken in the moment, and in almost any
situation usually with little formality, both the photographer and
the subject, who is often the same person, is preoccupied with
getting the right shot of themselves to immortalise the moment.
How often this goes wrong. The poser/photographer poses over
and over again, and only after many shots do they choose the one
which they feel most resembles them, as if all the others didn’t.
All those other moments are discarded in favour of the edited
idea of self, those moments which are less than who they think
they feel they are those less than the ideal moments.
are here and now, and where we would like to be which can never
really be achieved, and what we are left with is something inbetween,
a liminal space which we inhabit uneasily.
There seems to be a negotiation, as if it could ever really be
negotiated, between the temporal and the immortal, of where we

NEGOTIATING THE TEMPORAL AND IMMORTAL SPACE
There is an inherent absurdity in memento mori (Post Mortem)
photographs.
WHEN THE SUBJECT IS THE OBJECT AND
OBJECT BECOMES THE SUBJECT
When the subject is dead they are in effect an object. It’s interesting to
see therefore photographs which featured corpses posed to suggest
that they were still alive. The family of the diseased and the
photographer created the illusion that the person was still a living
being. I’m uncertain what the actual intention was, and although I’m
surmising that these were taken as a celebration of the diseased I
can’t help feeling that they were holding onto more than the memory:
That they were wishing for time to not only stand still, but to also wind
time backwards to the point when their loved ones were still alive.

NEGOTIATING THE TEMPORAL AND IMMORTAL SPACE
It is an odd phenomenon about photography in that that it
suspends time in the moment the shutter is depressed. It
provides a document of proof of reality in the form of the
print, and yet in respect of these photographs in some ways there
seems the desire to move time backwards to pre-mortem. Often
devices such as supportive armatures and furniture, as well as
friends and relative holding up the corpse would reinforce the
illusion of the person’s live presence. There seemed to be the
desire for the corpse to be the person they once were as opposed
to a mere object of what they had become.
greater irony though is in photographs were the viewer’s eye is
automatically drawn to the sharp focus of a subject. They seem
more compelling and even more alive to the viewer than their
companion sitters. However the captured blurred presence of the
other sitters point to the fact that they were alive and had their
animation caught on camera as opposed to the sitter in sharp
focus who was in fact an inanimate corpse.
The photographic process captures for all time, and in a
compelling manner this conceit, but often the contradiction is
apparent through certain visual signs such as some of the strange
postures of the diseased suggesting unnaturalness. Ironically it is
sometimes difficult to identify the living from the dead as the
living often stiffened like corpses to compensate for the time it
took to expose the film to light during the capture process. The

NEGOTIATING THE TEMPORAL AND IMMORTAL SPACE
Photographs of the dead posed as if they were living, as well as a device
which was used to support the corpse.

THE PROJECT
Take clothes for instance: An examination of
temporality and our frail attempts at
immortalising ourselves.
Having carried out some research and experiments on ill-fitting
clothing, and reflected on these as well as on the nature of why
people have photographs of themselves taken, I wanted my
project to comment on the temporality of the photographic
image and what many people’s expectations are of it when they
are depicted in portraits; that this photograph will represent me
as my ideal self, and will thus capture this moment for all time.
The tableaux nature of some of the photographs I intended to
take I hoped would reflect a time when photographs depicted
classic static poses, but I also wanted to juxtapose these with a
clear expression of the contradiction of things changing through
time. Clothes which had once fitted but didn’t any more I thought
would epitomise this. I also wanted to look at ways in which
clothing could look like anything other than that which would be
considered as ideal; clothing that people would prefer not to see
themselves in, and so clothing which fitted badly and was
misaligned I felt would express this. To further break down the
conceit of the photograph being of one moment in time I
intended to take the photographs into a post-production stage. In
Adobe Photoshop I would mix time up by blending and
compositing two or more photographs, and therefore I would be
bringing different moments together. This would further expose
the conceit of the seamless momentariness which photography
often infers. In doing all these things my ultimate aim was to
create a multi-layered, multi-temporal montage which
interrogated attitudes towards clothing, identity and time.
The nature of the next photo session would be again
experimental and the outcome would be dependent on the
surprise performative aspects that my collaborators, my
volunteers and the clothing would bring to the project.

I had only a rough clue as to the outcome of the photo-session as
the subjects would reveal when they played this out during the
session. Though I had an instinct that some of the themes I had
discussed, the fragility of time and of identity as mediated
through the camera and clothing, I was also aware that there
could be other aspects that appeared which as yet I had only a
vaguely inkling of. In this respect I accepted the project would be
open ended.
I had to re-think the way I worked on this project as I was aware
that my starting point could send me anywhere, and that where I
eventually ended up could be quite different to where I’d original
intended. Through the creative process I’d made various decisions
which changed the way I thought about the project. In this
important respect the outcome was something I could not have
imagined from the start.
Marcel Duchamp discusses this creative process in his talk in 1957
in Houston to the American Federation of the Arts as transcribed
in the text “The Creative Act.” when he talks about the
Mediumistic role in art. He states:
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to
realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
His struggle towards realization is a series of efforts, pains,
satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must
not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.
The result of this struggle is a difference between the
intention and the realization, a difference which the artist is
not aware of.
Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the
creative act, a link is missing. The gap which represents the
inability of the artist to express fully his intention; this
difference between what he intended to realize and did
realize, is the personal “art coefficient” contained in the
work.
In other words, the personal “art coefficient” is like the
arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended
and the unintentionally expressed.

This “art coefficient” which Duchamp refers to I’d much
identified with up to this point in the project’s
development. It was something I intended to enact
during the photo-shoot as the performative aspects
would throw up instances of things which I had no idea
would happen until the moment they occurred. My
hope was that something of these unexpected
elements would enhance my understanding of the
project I’d envisioned.

OUTCOMES/ARTEFACTS
Due to the fluid nature of the project my ideas towards an
outcome in the form of an exhibition only began to coalesce quite
late in its development. This would be influenced by the space in
which it was housed and at this point I had not decided where the
work would be situated.
I had however concluded that I would produce a number of works
which were digitally based and that these would be mostly
printed onto photographic paper. I would choose three
approaches to the images.
1. I’d generate some arrays of small images displaying
sequences of the photo-shoot. They would
demonstrate the performative aspects of my subjects
struggling with each other whilst trying on ill-fitting
clothes.
2. I’d choose combinations of images and with these I’d
blend and composite together in a rough manner to
show clearly that these images came from two different
sources and times. I wanted to visually express the
absurdity of doing this.
3. Some of the images from the photo-shoot I would use
as the basis of a video piece and this would be a
transition between various sequences of the
photographs. Though I did not know at this point the
manner in which this video sequence would be
produced I did want to convey the motion of the
struggle required to pull tight clothing on.

THE 2 ND PHOTO-SHOOT: ORGANISATION AND EXECUTION
In setting up the photo-shoot I early on encountered a major
problem. I’d been communicating with a lecturer involved in
physical theatre at the University of Kent and had requested that
some of her students might like to volunteer to take part in my
project. However her response was Luke warm. The major
stumbling block was that because the session might involve semi
nudity she felt this was an inappropriate thing she could
recommend. I’d replied that this could be avoided suggesting
suitable strategies and had asked if she would reconsider.
However as time was marching close to the deadline date I
decided that I needed to rethink who would collaborate with me.
Freya volunteered her help again but it left me with another
problem in that I felt the project needed at least two volunteers,
and one of these should be a male. I cast around for prospective
collaborators but those I contacted found my request either
weird, or could not give of their time on the dates I’d set aside for
the photo-session. In my desperation I thought of a work
colleague who was sympathetic to my arts practice, but felt that it
was too much to ask him to pose with Freya. As this dilemma
increased due to my worry that I’d not get anyone to pose for me
in time an idea came to me that would radically change the
dynamics of the photo-shoot. Instead of my friend posing for me
why couldn’t he take the photographs?
This seemed to fit perfectly with what I was doing. He had been a
professional photographer and had expressed a desire to work
with me on a project before. The other advantage was that I could
pose with my partner Freya and she was already familiar with the
types of things I was attempting to achieve. Having discussed the
project with my friend and shown him some of the early images
he became enthusiastically involved.

The photo-shoot took place in the same location as the last one.
However the light was not as bright and my friend Iain took the
decision to shoot at a higher sensitivity, choosing 800 ISO as
opposed to 400 ISO which I’d chosen earlier. This would make the
image output very grainy, but I considered that this might be a
virtue as I’d wanted to emphasise a rough quality in the images.
I’d also reflected that I’d be dependent on Iain, who would now
take control of the camera, and despite me explaining the brief to
him, it would be his decision as to when he pressed the shutter
button, and that his collaboration would therefore have a big
impact on the outcome of the project. Prior to the
commencement of the shoot Freya and I had collected a range of
clothes. Some were our own, but others came from charity shops.
These we tried out beforehand to test their suitable unsuitability.
The clothes which were very difficult to get on we preferred
because it was this challenge which created awkward the
conditions I was looking for.
As with the previous photo-shoot Freya and I took it upon
ourselves to try on different combinations of clothing. We either
placed clothes upon ourselves or got the other to place the
clothes on us. This was especially challenging with the apparel
which didn’t fit as our efforts became more frantic as we forced
ourselves into these clothes. Pulling a tiny top over the other’s
head or tight trousers that didn’t fit around the waist, a jacket
whose arms were too narrow, or footwear which was too small
caused us to contort our bodies in a manner where they became
misshapen, and this had the effect of dramatically altering our
postures. During all these procedures direction came from not
just me, but also from Freya and Iain. Various clothing suggestions
were enacted with not just Freya and me, but also with Iain
suggesting things we could try out. Because Iain had ultimate
control over the camera he had requested he take certain
sequences of shots which he liked the look of, and this became
part of the output which I eventually worked on.
The photo-shoot took place over the middle of the afternoon
after which I uploaded the images on to the computer. In total
around seven hundred images had been captured.

OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS
The images which had been captured displayed Freya and I in
various states of dishevel as we tried unsuccessfully to push and
pull the clothing onto ourselves and each other. What struck me
most was this state of struggle in conflict with the selection of
clothes we had chosen. The emotional impact on me as I scanned
though these images was to make me feel uncomfortable. That I
was re-experiencing this feeling again in response to the
photographs was significant.
I’d recently been to see a performance at the Gulbenkian Theatre.
It was a physical performance piece called COAL by the Gary
Clarke Theatre Company which commemorated the anniversary
of the 1894 miners’ strike. There was something deeply
compelling about this performance. The sheer physicality and
energy was impressive as it was sustained throughout. Despite its
narrative and theatricality, underlying this there was something
primordial and visceral. This infected me on a physical level as I
witnessed the performers in states of conflict and struggle against
their enacted environment as they simulated being pressed into
the pit shaft and the narrow tunnels where lack of space caused
physical restrictions. Alongside this I also witnessed the
performers in states where their limbs were freed from their
restrictions and these frayed uncontrollably outwards from their
prior restraints. There was criss-crossing within the
moving composition of performers which created tensions,
cutting up the flow and interrupting the energy
and movement which producing redundancies despite efforts for
that energy to be thrown outwards. It also left me with the
feeling that I’d seen this type of performance elsewhere, and this
came to me later on that evening. In The Raft of Medusa by
Theodore Gericault similar struggles and conflicts were taking
place. When I looked at the publicity photographs for COAL it
struck me that these two distinctly different art forms had arrived
at a similar aesthetic and were communicating very similar
messages on the level of affect.

Coal: Gary Clarke Theatre Company
The Raft of Medusa: Theodore Gericault

The performance induced an uneasy physical state in me: It made
me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, and I began to think that my
own photographs might generate something of this state of
affect. If the work caused this state of unease then it was due to
the uptake in minds of the viewers and in this respect the images
were dependent on the viewer’s performative re-enactment of
the images they were experiencing.
route around for other images and found that there was indeed
an aesthetic for this strange off-putting fashion aesthetic.
I’d bought a copy of the Saturday Guardian Newspaper some
months ago and within the newspaper on a full page spread there
was an advertisement for the fashion house Celine. There was a
photograph of a young model who sat awkwardly in badly fitting
clothes. I began to wonder what the merit of this design choice
was as the model look gawky and unbecoming. Surely there was
no way that any person in their right mind would buy apparel
having looked at this advertisement. Or was I missing the point?
Was there some kind of visual umami which I was not able to
understand or appreciate? This troubled me and so I began to

I came across the work of fashion photographer Juergen Teller
and his depictions of Kristin McMenamy expressed a similar state
of awkwardness and unease. In their collaboration as part of
Marc Jacobs’ 2006 advertising campaign, the bizarre, the
grotesque, the abject, and the ugly feature strongly in the
photography. One is left feeling deeply uncomfortable. Indeed
these images are by no means unique today in using disquieting
imagery to sell clothes.
Eugénie Shinkle (2013), in a paper on “uneasy bodies” and their
representation in contemporary fashion photography, examines
these types of imagery and argues that they have an underlying
biological register and exists beyond the analysis of signs utilised
in the service semiology. She cites “Simulation theory’ and posits
that the human capacity for understanding the behaviour of
others is facilitated, in part, by the presence of socalled “mirror
neurons” (Rizzolatti et al. 1996). She argues that it “plays a crucial
role in the perception and aesthetic experience of images.” She
also states “This automatic, unconscious somatic activity provides
a framework for a variety of interpersonal relations, among them
the empathetic reactions that are so important to our perception
of images of the body.”
Her key argument is “The perception of images involves seeing
and reading, but also, importantly, it involves feeling.”
Notwithstanding all the other issues I’d looked at in my journal
which I felt were important in themselves, my strongest response
was based on my empathic visceral responses to the images I’d
created.

2 nd PHOTO-SHOOT IMAGES

2 ND PHOTO-SHOOT IMAGES

2 ND PHOTO-SHOOT IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION
Following the Photo-shoots I employed Photoshop to post-edit
the images. This I originally thought would fly in the face of the
purpose of the project as in my view the images needed to be
explicitly raw. However given that I was already creating montage
conditions in respect of the way the ill-fitting clothes were being
utilised to break down the unity of the appearance of my
subjects’, I began to think that this use of Photoshop would
further enhance the idea of this montage. I would also be taking
liberties with the temporal, momentary nature of photography by
a cut and shut compositing technique of two or more images
from different times. I also began to appreciate that the aesthetic
appeal of the hide and reveal nature of layer masking as in many
ways it conformed to a notion of dressing and undressing, the
very subject of my project.
My major concern in regard to Photoshop is that often it is used
to bring disparate elements into a unified whole, to blend these
anomalies together, and my purpose was to do the complete
opposite. However I realised that two or more images restacked
opaquely in layers would be hidden and this would ensure that I
would be unable to see which elements of the underlying images
I would be blending with the topmost image layer. There was in
effect collaboration between me, the software’s blending
capacities, and the images in the negotiation of what would
ultimately be revealed to the viewer because I could not in effect
determine the outcome in advance. I deliberately did not finesse
the masks as I wanted to show the rough painting between
layered images and show clearly that I was mixing up different
imagery and points in time. As I worked with these composites I
especially highlighted the absurdities which became revealed to
me through the masks. Subjects would share each other’s body
parts, limbs would double up, and the front, side and back of a
subject would be depicted within the same picture space.

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

POST PRODUCTION IMAGES

VIDEO I TRANSFORMATIONS
I also wanted to create a video based piece of work from some of
the sequences of photographs to show awkward uncomfortable
transition states through time, and I had selected a series of
images of Freya going through the process of pulling a top too
tight for her over her head. However at this point I had no
knowledge of video editing software and despite looking at a
range of easy options which had alpha transitioning their
implementation was either subject to software wizards with little
control over the timescale of the transition, or the resulting
transitions looked like canned effects. In the end I decide to use
Adobe Premier as I’d read that its transitioning tools would offer
me greater control.
However the alpha transitions were global meaning that they
occurred over the entire image and I wanted only portions of an
image to be revealed through other over and underlying images.
The effect which I was looking for was for the imagery to look
distorted and contorted, and straightforward transitions would
not achieve this for me. I found a fix in firstly creating transitioned
still images in Adobe Photoshop which I then imported into
Premier to transition again. This really mixed things up and gave
me the effect I wanted. To enhance the awkwardness even more I
experimented with the times between transitions, having some
transition states which ran slowly whilst others ran quickly. The
overall effect was a confusing nonsensical movement between
image states.
In another section of the video I had decided to use a series of
images which Iain had taken as an experiment. These were by and
large blurred and over exposed but the sequence expressed the
struggle between Freya and me with a jacket. I employed the
same strategy as with the other video except that the individual
image slides were transitioned so quickly as to flash into and out
of view. I also overlaid this animation with larger transitions of the
same images but at a very low opacity so one could see through
to the other sequence, and I imported and overlaid an image of
folded material to add to the montaged effect. The overall
appearance gave an impressional feel to the animation as only
snippets of visual information flashed before the eyes.

VIDEO STILLS

VIDEO STILLS

Screenshot of the Video Animation
All material created by Richard Hall

LOCATION AND DISPLAY
Late into the project I had not decided on a location but as time
was pressing close to the deadline I had to make up my mind
about the options available to me. I’d looked at three spaces, but
two of these were in sound rooms and despite their intimate size,
a quality which I thought would lend the images some impact,
their wall were covered with a hessian material to absorb echoes.
Both the colour and softness of the walls put me off these spaces
as I thought I’d have to create a harder boarded inner shell of a
lighter hue which would also make it easier to hang the pictures,
and this would be both problematic in terms of getting
permission to do this, as well as time consuming. The remaining
option was a large rectangular room. However its size I found
intimidating as I felt the work might be lost in it. This space was
also cluttered with a large amount of student debris, as well as
over a dozen tables and a larger number of chairs which I was told
I would not be allowed to remove.
I did however commit to using this space, but I’d have to tailor my
strategy to its limitations and work to the opportunities it
afforded me. With regularly spaced windows this was a feature
which dictated how the images would be hung. Despite this there
was a tremendous amount of wall space which would have to be
negotiated. I made the decision that I would cover all of the wall
space available as I felt that only by doing this the artwork would
take command of the space and demand attention. Fortunately
I’d been able to generate a large number of images, so this was
not a problem.
There was an overhead projector and screen already available in
the room and after reflecting for some time about other locations
for the video projection I decided that the default location was
ideal as the projected video could cover a larger wall surface than
anywhere else in the room. The sketch I made of a hanging plan
also revealed that if I had large prints made of the artwork I’d be
able to create a visual continuity between these and the
projected video.

With all the artworks, the printed still images and the video completed the
hanging and projection was reasonably straightforward. Still images were
selected by merit that they appeared to fit together as pairs between the
windows. Their hanging consisted of placing batons at the top and bottom behind
the prints. They had metal clips placed at their tops and fishing wire was looped
through these clips. They were then suspended from screws which had been
drilled into the picture rails above. This hanging technique was simple and did not
distract from the displayed artwork. The video projection was calibrated so that
its size fitted in with the scheme of the wall hangings.

...summary
reflections

There were many things I could say about plotting a project by
relinquishing control to collaborations as this had major
ramifications on the directions I would take. Textual research as
well as conversations with mentors and friends pointed me in the
direction of routes which I pursued, though I often felt swamped
by the numerous pathways where academic writing could take
me. Published works focussing on clothes and the meanings they
imbued I realised had so much breadth and depth that I did not
have enough time to research as fully as I would have wished. The
project which emerged from these explorations I felt was
therefore too big for the time constraints to allow.
However the materials I was working with, my subjects which
included me, the camera which was ultimately taken out of my
control, and the agency of the clothes which due to their bad fit
placed inherent constraints on the subjects, pushed and pulled
the project to the place where it ended up.
Importantly however the insistent state of unease which I’d
experienced at the beginning of the process was ultimately the
overriding element which became the thing that I sublimated into
my theme. Despite my other reflections on the fragility of identity
as mediated through clothes and the lens of the camera,
important though these were, I kept coming back to this much
deeper vein of meaning. This instinctive feeling which persisted
correlated closely to ill-fitting clothes and the idea cited by
Shinkle that “The perception of images involves seeing and
reading, but also, importantly, it involves feeling,” seemed to
summarise those sentiments which I’d attempted to express in
my work.
In hindsight I would have like to have exploited these qualities
more than I feel I was able on this project. I do however think that
some of this feeling is conveyed through my depictions and I hope
that this opens up the dialogue for a larger discussion on the
meanings of clothes.

take
clothes
for
instance…
All material created by Richard Hall
© 2017 Richard Hall. All rights reserved.