Biographies and Autobiographies

This lecture was much more stimulating as the lecturer wasn't simply reading from the notes behind a computer screen - he stepped forwards and was animated as he spoke which engaged me as a listener throughout the lecture content. I found the content of this lecture very interesting as there were many different ways to present a narrative...

Such as a comic strip, like in Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer - in which he writes a biography of his mother as she goes through the horrific ordeal of lung cancer.

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The comic strip is a very simple and easy format of displaying a narrative: though the use of visual tiles. Fies says how he uses the convention of comic book characters wearing the same clothes because "(readers) don't have to stop and figure out who they are when they show up later. A uniform helps identify them... In Mom's Cancer the characters wear the same clothes most of the time; when they change clothes late in the story, it helps signal the reader that time has passed." Another technique Fies uses when constructing his comic strip narratives is his use of colour;  "the story's mostly black and white, but anything that is extraordinary, fantastic, subjective or unreal appears in colour."

Onto more photographic examples, Sophie Calle creates quite an intrusive biography of hotel guests during her 3 weeks as a chambermaid there.

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In this biography series Calle uses photography as a form of surveillance. Each of the twelve rooms gave rise to a diptych of similar structure following the occupancy of one or more guests during the period of the artist’s employment at the hotel. Some rooms feature more than once as a second set of guests occupied them, giving rise to a total of twenty-one diptychs in the series. Calle’s descriptions of the hotel rooms and their contents combine factual documentation along with her personal response to the people whose lives she glimpsed by examining their belongings. 

I feel inspired by Calle's work although it is controversial as she is so intrusive in acquiring her collection of images to build up this anonymous biography of strangers who probably don't even know what's going on, however her display of it is aesthetically pleasing. Fies' use of colour - or lack thereof - is also interesting in how to construct a narrative and I may look into this for my own presentations of narratives.