A brilliant example of photography with strong conceptual meaning comes from the French film ‘Amélie’ directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2001. Audrey Tautou plays the main character Amélie Poulain; a shy waitress living in Paris who decides that she will dedicate her life to making others happy.
The part of this film that has particular relevance to my work is when the audience meets Nino Quincampoix, played by Mathieu Kassovitz, a man whose hobby is to collect discarded photos from the various photo booths situated on Parisian metro stations.
There is a beauty to collecting abandoned images that the owners didn’t want to keep anymore that reflects the work of Joachim Schmid whose work is made up of the images that he finds on the streets. It adds more beauty and relevance when the images found are ripped up, as the physical destruction of an image of themselves shows the subject’s feelings towards the image. This is seen both in Amélie and in Schmid’s work.
There is one image in Nino’s scrapbook that fascinates Amélie and himself in particular; a bald, serious looking man who routinely takes his picture over many different occasions, and then rips it up and discards it. Throughout the film they wonder why he takes his picture so many times only to discard it straight away and the reasons that they imagine are wild and inventive. So when you finally discover that the bald man is simply the repair man, who takes his photo to check that he has fixed the machine, you feel Nino’s relief to finally understand the man’s motives. But as the audience, you can’t help but wish that there was a more interesting conceptual meaning behind his discarded images.
This is why I think it’s important to let your artwork speak for itself; a strong conceptual meaning is always important, especially when depicting identity in portraiture, but often the viewer likes to create their own interpretation of the images, and like in Amélie, they may prefer their interpretation more than the real concept.
An image taken from the film Amélie, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001
PHOTOBOOTH. 2014. Amélie [Online] [Viewed 1st March 2015]. Available from: http://www.photobooth.net/movies_tv/index.php?movieID=45
GOLDBERG. V, 2003. The Photo Booth: A Portrait Studio of One’s Own. The New York Times [Online] [Viewed 1st March 2015]. Available from: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA106198450&v=2.1&u=southampton&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=9a631090e714537f58241e8c55c7fdb4
Representations Genevieve Mundy 