Gabriela Duran-Barraza: Framing Photographs Conceptually
Gabriela Durán-Barraza’s mission is to do aesthetic research (i.e., neuroaesthetics, art practice, and art education) as a way to understand and connect with others. She has an M. A. on Experimental Psychology and a Ph.D. in Psychology: Social, Cognitive and Neurosciences from the University of Texas at El Paso. She did her postdoctoral studies at the University of Arizona with a focus on Scientific Aesthetics. Currently, she is a professor of Visual Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and is a research associate at Node Center for Curatorial Studies in Berlin. Gabriela’s recent research has focused on better understanding the role of conceptual knowledge in art appreciation as well as the use of new media technologies in the development of community-based art.
IL: Hola Gabriela, a couple of months ago I was lucky to see you in El Paso, where you shared with me that you had already published the article of a research I had the pleasure to know you were working on a few years ago, as I assisted for one of your presentations about it at UTEP. You titled it Effects of Conceptual Titles on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Artistic Photographs . After reading it, I thought that this platform would be ideal to talk about it. So thank you for accepting this interview! Can you give us a little bit of background about this research?
GDB: First, thank you Ingrid for this interview and for being interested in my work. I’ve been teaching a class about contemporary art for more than 10 years and one of the things that comes to mind each time I teach it is this: the knowledge about the artwork that leads to understanding it better is central to appreciating it more. That is, the more you know about an artwork, the more you like it, most of the time. So I wanted to test this, how does knowing something about an artwork make you like or dislike it more? And so one thing led to the next. First of all, the easiest way to study knowledge about an artwork is to study titles. Then, I was at the University of Arizona which has one of the largest collections of photography in the U.S. — so, why not study photography? So I did. I picked John Gutmann out of many photographers because he really cared about titles, and his titles are not descriptive but rather poetic. This is how my research was created.
Presence of the Enigma, 1939 Photograph by John Gutmann, Collection Center for Creative Photography © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
As far as I know, there is not a lot of work showing the effects of conceptual knowledge in photography. Maybe there is work about it that I don’t know but I felt the necessity of exploring the subject more because the meaning of a photograph can completely change based on the information attached to it in a specific moment. For example, something I described in the document, is the work of Gorin and Godar (1972) about a photo of Jane Fonda. Based on the info they are presenting at each moment, the meaning of the photo changes completely.
IL: Could you tell us about the experiments you did?
GDB: Two of them were about students answering questions. In the first one, students evaluated the photographs without titles and then with titles. Some of the titles were descriptive (they described the scene in the photograph) and other ones were Gutmann’s. The descriptive titles didn’t have an effect and were evaluated the same as the photographs without titles. But the photographs that were presented with Gutmann’s original titles were rated higher in terms of liking and interest.
In the second experiment, we just used Gutmann’s photographs with their original conceptual titles. But we created three conditions. In the first one, there were the titles corresponding to each of the images. In the second one we associated the photographs in an aleatory way with the titles. In the third one we associated the titles with an image that somehow corresponded to the title, but it wasn’t what Gutmann would have associated with the title. We found that the photographs with the titles that Gutmann associated with his own pictures were the ones rated higher in terms of liking and interest.
In the third experiment we presented Gutmann’s photographs with the original title or without a title, and students had to use digital squares to point out the areas in the photographs that they found interesting. And so the photos that were presented with Gutmann’s chosen titles had more areas of interest for the students. That is, they place a greater number of digital squares.
All reported results were measured statistically, or are statistically significant. This means that these effects can be replicated and they didn’t happen just by chance..
Portrait of a Marriage, 1935 Photograph by John Gutmann, Collection Center for Creative Photography © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents
IL: In thinking about John Guttman’s work— Do you think that if you would place a conceptual photograph paired with a conceptual title, the outcome would be different?
GDB: Very interesting question. One of the discoveries that we found during this research is that artists' decisions are central for artworks to work. So the answer to your question would be: depends on the artist. Artists have a very good sensibility to make such decisions, the better the artist the better they are at this, and so, a conceptual photograph may not need a title, others may need a descriptive one, and others a conceptual one. But that is not a decision for me to make.
IL: I was visiting the projects in your webpage and found this meta-photographic study you did almost a decade ago titled This is Eye where you used an eye tracker to register and measure how you look at your own selfies intermixed with quotes from two particular songs. This project reminded me about your present research, but also to the necessity you expressed in it, of exploring the eye movements to continue testing the implied effects of titles. It made me wonder if you can identify links of your past works with this one.
GDB: I was working lots of hours in the eye-tracker, as I did with the experiment on John Gutmann’s photographs. There were three months of spending at least 5 hours a day from Monday through Friday learning how to use the machine. Those days I was in Tucson and I was missing Cd. Juárez. I was sad because of that, so in my free time I took selfies to cheer myself up. One thing led to another and that is when I decided to make a piece using the eye-tracker. The idea doesn’t have to do a lot with my recent or later work. It's just exploring the idea that in these times, we are hyper conscious of ourselves. So that’s why in the piece I measure myself by looking at myself, as if generating all these levels of consciousness simultaneously, somewhat referring to the hyper control that we seek to have over ourselves and our image.
IL: How interesting. If you could ask yourself a question about your own research, what would that question be?
GDB: Do you consider your scientific research about art artistic?
IL: I love this. And what do you think?
GDB: I feel it’s a form of art. Some critics say that studying art scientifically is reductionist and that it’s the furthest thing from art. For me, this is not the case. I feel that little by little science is showing how complex and powerful art is in relationship with humanity.
IL: I know that this research led to a new one that you are going to do in the next few months, could you share a little bit about what it will be about?
GDB: I am interested in the idea of essentialism–when we think that there is an essence in the work of art that makes us think of it as something special instead of being judged as an ordinary object. My next experiment is going to deal with this.
IL: That’s exciting! I would love to learn more about this. Do you mind giving our interview today a title?
GDB: Framing Photographs Conceptually
IL: Thank you Gabriela!