Auteur?

Auteur theory

Recently I showed my work to a few people and one of the more definitive answers that came out of this was a question of style, the authorship or the photographer as auteur.

Auteur theory is mainly based in film; think of your favourite movies, do they have a signature of style, content or visuality? Then that would be the work of an auteur.1

I see that point and in my particular case I believe it has a number of reasons, mainly in the work practices of my previous guise as a working photographer.

I consciously choose the path that consisted of having no definitive style then hopefully the clients’ ideas could shine through without being caught up in stylistic arguments, main thought were aligned with Helmut Newton’s “Gun for Hire” statement2. On reflection I’m not sure there were too many actual discussions on this but it was widely accepted I think, it served me well up until I’d say about 10 years ago, of course having no style means that you have a style but that’s a whole ‘nother theory.

Now the main facet of the practice is changing to a more considered one with a more thoughtful and artistic exploration, of which the style will be a major component so I will have to unlearn the “no style” approach and really apply a visual code to highlight what I want people to see in the work. 

The first part of this structure was the choice of subject matter to a more thought based communicative exploration of ideas, I would say the first successful one would be the ideas of how photography is projected all of this through the MA study3. The next step was by diversifying the equipment used, the ones selected has facilitated a different approach that through exploration and time will yield differing results as I say to students if you know what you don’t want then inevitably you will then start the pathway to what you do want.

I realise that time will be a major key to this too: both in study, preparation and then the time spent on actually doing the work. These processes must all be elongated and explored thoroughly. I must admit though that the thought of producing work in a singular, identifiable style, does give me cold sweats…

So as always, a blog needs an image so here we have a side by side of work from when I first started the approaches that signify Urgent Temporality and one taken after the thought processes discussed here4.

One taken as Urgent Temporality was being established and one taken very recently as the idea has formulated and settled.

Can you see anything there?

Thank you for reading.

Notes:

1 A term that is credited to a Austrian born theatre turned film director Max Reinhardt in the 1910’s then revived by French New Wave directors François Truffaut most notably, it is the idea that the director is the main driving force in communicating the idea of the production, the writers, camera operator, editors, actors etc. don’t have any overall control, it is the directors vision that is communicated in the piece. Of course there is an alternative theory to this, one where the writer-centered idea of the auteur but this is a less popular one than the auteur theory.

2 Helmut Newton photographer, who famously said that:

"Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not.

If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum,

that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire"

("Newsweek", 02/02/04).

He also said that

“Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is

killing it already.”

So there’s that.  

3 You can see that here: www.urgent-temporality.co.uk/work/semester-3-final

There is also some text if you’re interested in the ideas behind the work. 

4 Image choice is one from January 2020 possibly a Stockholm image as that what where I first started to think of it as a coherent direction for study and one image from June 2021 when this blog was written and when the theories are the most formed.