So far I have done three workshops at the London Centre for Book Arts, and have learned to make a Solander Box (which I have been using as a portfolio case) and most recently a single section case bound book and two styles of multi-section open spine books (see LCBA, 2017; Orriss, 2014; Abbott, 2010). Elsewhere, I have produced Japanese four-hole stab bound book (Yotsume-toji). Whilst doing this, I’ve given thought to how I might integrate making books into my practice.
For the ‘micro-projects’ in my FMP, I plan to produce simple zine type publications based on the work produced by participants. The design of this and the production of a dummy could be one of the activities for the final session (in which we will also plan and produce work for the pop-up exhibition). These will probably be in the form of a simple stapled pamphlet, a concertina or folded booklet or loose images held together in some way or in an envelope/folder.
From the start, I have been committed to producing artefacts from the work, so one option would be a limited run artist’s book, along the lines, perhaps, of Ryo Kusumoto’s (2018) (連師子/Renjishi, which uses a number of the techniques that I’ve learned at the workshops.
A major challenge is the choice of paper and being able to print on both sides (essential for books based on sections), which limits choice of paper stock. One option is to use drum leaf binding, which uses individual sheets of paper. An alternative, which I used for the stab bound book, is to use thinner paper and fold this, as shown below.
I’m not yet convinced of the potential of this; it may be that the process, form and content of the project requires something more flexible (like an archive of material that can be configured in different ways.
References
Abbott, K. 2010. Bookbinding: A step-by-step guide. Marlborough: The Crowood Press.
Kusumoto, R. 2018. (連師子/Renjishi. Tokyo: Reminders Photography Stronghold.
LCBA, 2017. Making Books: A guide to making hand-crafted books. London: Pavillion.
Orriss, L. 2014. Craft Bookbinding. Marlborough: The Crowood Press.
Quick update on the planning for the constituent projects for the FMP (structure outlined here).
Barking Town Centre
Greatfields School. Met with the Headteacher and he was enthusiastic about the project. The plan is to meet with the teacher leading the GCSE Photography programme early September and to run six workshops between then and December with a group of 3 to 5 GCSE students who live on the Gascoigne Estate. This will be part of a wider set of initiatives to engage the community. He also gave me contacts with local arts groups to follow up.
BDHCG. Lent a small digital camera to Keith to take photographs around the area, and also processed and scanned some of his analogue photographs. He took around 400 frames and has sent more subsequently. I designed a flier with one of the images for distribution at events over he weekend. Went with a group for a tour of the developments and took photographs.
Barking and Dagenham College. To follow up with head of section. Also need to discuss access to scanner and darkroom, and possible workshops for students in September
Barking Riverside
TWCP. Took photographs at the Community Summit to add to repository. Also spoke to members of the TWCP Citizen Action about follow up activity. Spoke with Shed Life group about photographic work about the area to display as part of the launch event planned for December.
Riverside Campus. Talked to Head about project idea and will follow up with designated member of staff and with TWCP organiser, who is interested in the idea, perhaps with the Young Citizen Action Group.
New View Arts. I have arranged four workshops in August as part of the summer programme. This will provide the opportunity to trial the approach, and prepare for micro-projects in the schools next term.
Technical preparation
I have been making photographs with the 5×4 camera and processing and scanning these. Given the environmental impact of chemical plants in the area in the past, I have started to use low environmental impact chemicals in processing, and reclaiming silver from the fixer before disposal. I now have six low cost digital cameras and have been experimenting with these. I’m doing further work with channel mixing and other ways of making composites (including the use of colour, which I hope to trial with the New View Arts group). The environmental impact of digital photography also has to be addressed, given the construction of a large data centre nearby, and the high levels of power consumption this entails.
This exhibition of work from postgraduate architecture courses is spread across a number of commercial practices in the Clerkenwell area. For this module, and my own work, it was interesting for three reasons.
Greenwich @ Knauf, 2019
Firstly the exhibitions were in non-gallery spaces, and therefore placed speculative work alongside current commercial activity. They demonstrate the potential of non-conventional exhibition space, and the way in which this can bring different audiences and forms of activity together.
Bartlett @ USM, 2019
Secondly, the use of models, and movement between 2D and 3D forms, is well-established in architecture. Increasingly people are using 3D printing to produce new and novel forms, and to explore the potential of new materials and practices in construction. In a multi-modal, photography based work there would be potential in using similar techniques (for instance, Giovanna Petrocchi has made imaginary archeological artefacts using 3D printing in her Private Collection series).
Thirdly, there was a strong resonance between the imagining, and shaping, of the future city in some of the work, and core concerns in my own work. This was particularly marked in the University of Greenwich@Knauf exhibition. Most of the work was 2D, and projected a particular view of the future. The resonance may be due to the landscape dimension of the Greenwich programme, and the concern for global environmental and ethical issues. This work, in particular, made me think about other techniques I could use to explore relations between the human and natural environment and the past, the present and projected/anticipated futures.
Having had to work intensively on production of a book manuscript to a tight deadline over the past few weeks, I haven’t felt much like writing CRJ entries (beyond the routine). I have, though, been able to reflect on the development of my practice in process terms, and relate this to my plans for the FMP. In doing this, I have tried to develop a coherent and consistent approach to the development of my own practice, which is reflected in, and consistent with, the constituent components of my final project.
The approach I am developing is iterative in the sense that it evolves incrementally through interactions between theory (general and specifically related to the arts and photography), field (what other artists/photographers are doing, both as individuals and as ‘schools’), practice (what I am doing in terms of my own photography, and other artistic and academic work) and context (the macro and micro contexts within which I am working). With a bit of thought, I could probably represent this diagrammatically, but for the moment, there are a couple issues that I would like to explore.
The first question is where to start this process? My feeling is that it doesn’t matter, hence the title ‘learning to read (and write) our own work’. Reflection is a process of making sense of our work, relating it to theory (the concepts and frameworks available to us to make sense of and advance our work) and to the field (positioning our work in relation to other practitioners and transform how we view that work relationally). The sense we make of the work is also influenced by the contexts within which we do the work, and what is possible within those contexts, and how this might affect both what we do and how we interpret and describe it. Viewed in this way, our readings of our own work (and consequently, our readings of the work of others) is becoming incrementally more sophisticated and informed, and that in turn facilitates the iterative development of that work. This does not, of course, preclude quantum leaps (radical changes in how we understand and position what we do, or in the form of work that we produce, where we do the work, where and how we distribute the work and so on). We are not, however, just producing, circulating and reading our work, but also writing it – that is making our practices and interpretations explicit. This is a necessary part of a pedagogic process (‘showing our workings’), and also a constructive component of a wider process of producing and distributing our work as part of a community of practitioners. Whilst a clear sense of intent is necessary, it is not sufficient: that intent has to be positioned (principally, but not exclusively, in the field of photography) and it has to be capable of being realised in practice.
Secondly, there is the question of the relationship between this process of development of practice and the practice itself. In an attempt to avoid an overly deterministic approach to participatory photography, I have attempted to mirror the relational and iterative nature of the development of my practice in processes that I use in my project. This is a way of escaping from the restrictions of bringing an already prefigured project to participants, which necessarily objectifies participants and restricts their agency and ability to produce something that has both value to them and to the wider project. So having defined a broad focus for the project (community engagement with urban regeneration) and a conceptual base (drawing on post-humanism and new materialism, exploring the entanglement of the human and the non-human in spacetime, and oscillation between the analogue and the digital, and the embodied and the virtual), the specific focus of each component of the project and the forms of the outcomes in each component of the project emerge from following the same process (creation of an archive, digital image making, sorting/classifying/editing/relating, rephotographing, mixing/compositing/juxtaposing, narrating, curating/disseminating). How different the outcomes are from each component/setting is an open (empirical) question.
There’s a lot to be done on every front here (for instance, in clarifying the theoretical underpinning of the move between analogue and digital, in the specification of the process, in the identification and organisation of the settings and participants, in the archival work on each location and in the development of the skills necessary for every part of the process). I’ll address these in the coming posts, and index these posts to the key themes of the module.
My project is fundamentally place-based and participatory, so it makes sense that the presentation of the outcomes relates closely to the context in which the work is produced, is accessible to local people and encourages active engagement with the work and the issues being explored. The final project is composed of a number of smaller projects exploring change in particular places with different age groups. Each of these small projects will culminate with a pop-up exhibition in, or close to, the place that we have been working (for instance, in the school or community centre where the workshops were held). As well as these ‘local’ exhibitions, material from all the projects will be brought together in a final ‘joint’ exhibition. I have a number of places in mind for this exhibition, which will be accessible to the participants in the projects (including the local theatre, local FE college, a hotel threatened with demolition, a community centre, and a disused power station) – the form taken by that exhibition, as with the pop-up exhibitions, will depend on the characteristics of the space.
From the early stages of the project, I have been committed to a ‘multi-modal’ form of exhibition, which includes artefacts, texts and sound, as well as photographs (which can also be treated as artefacts). In the previous module I explored the use of animations and in this module I am experimenting with projection. The tpg new talent 19 exhibition at The Photographers Gallery illustrates a number of the ways in which contemporary photographers are exploring different modes and materials, and ways of juxtaposing elements of their work. These works do not meet the criteria that Bishop (2005) provides for ‘installation art’ (in the most part, they are not immersive, theatrical or experiential), but nor are they clearly ‘installation of art’ (as the individual pieces do not assume a greater significance than the whole). My sense is that new, and more complex, meaning potential is produced through the juxtaposition of images and other elements, and through the exploration of different surfaces.
Seungwon Jung, The Photographers Gallery, 2019
Seungwon Jung, for instance, prints photographs on fabric and then shapes and pick away strands from this, producing three dimensional works. As with my own work, she is interested in the exploration of notions of space and time (and memory and oblivion), and does this through the overlaying of images (on fabric) in ways in which layers interact with, but do not destroy, each other.
Rhiannon Adam, The Photographers Gallery, 2019
Rhiannon Adam‘s exploration of life on the Pitcairn Islands uses a range of forms of photography (including the use of expired Polaroid stock) and presents images alongside texts (including notes, documents and letters) in a single plane. Alberto Feijóo combines photography with collage, book design and model making, bringing objects that have been used in the production of the images into the gallery, and giving the process of making equal, or greater, status to the images produced in a three dimensional exhibition. Giovanna Petrocchi draws on images from online museum collections and combines these with personal photographs and 3D printed artefacts, moving between an imaginary past (as represented in museum artefacts) and an imagined future (in the creation of future artefacts), and using traditional and digital production processes. The other artists similarly combine modes in a variety of ways.
Alberto Feijóo, The Photographers Gallery, 2019
Giovanna Petrocchi , The Photographers Gallery, 2019
Key considerations for my project are how visible to make the process for production of the work, and what balance to be achieved between different elements of the work (for instance, contextual material about the area, work produced by participants, collaborative work and my own work). A 3D component is also worth consideration, not just in the use of artefacts and the arrangement of work, but also, perhaps, in some form of model making (using, for instance, folded card, drawing on Paul Jacksons’ (2014) cut and fold techniques), subverting the use of models by developers.
References
Bishop, C. (2005). Installation Art: a critical history. London: Tate. Jackson, P. (2014). Cut and Fold Techniques for Pop-Up Designs. London: Laurence King Publishing.
This week provided the space to plan and map out activities for the remaining weeks of this module and relate this work to the development of the FMP. An outline of activities is given as a roadmap here. In terms of methodology, it has provided the opportunity to relate the exploration of different image making strategies in the first part of the module to forthcoming exploration of modes of presentation of work and engagement of audience, and consider how this relates to conceptual and theoretical development. The aim is to achieve a degree of coherence and consistency between these dimensions of practice: each must inform the other. Over this week, the major development in this respect is coming to view this as an iterative process, and then attempting to mirror this process in the way that I work with participants in the project. In terms of methodology, this has led to a more detailed mapping out of process of working with different groups, which can lead to variation in the focus of the work with each group and different forms of output at the end of the process. This is reflected in the sequence of workshops planned from each group (sketched out here). What provides coherence is an underlying conceptual framework and a broad focus on the exploration of the exploration of the experience of change in the social, cultural, built and natural environment brought about by regeneration projects. I’ll explore specific aspects of this in posts over the coming weeks. In terms of photography over the next few weeks, I want to test out elements of the process, which will entail both technical and aesthetic challenges.
Deepwater @ theprintspace, July 2019
I also had the opportunity to visit the Deepwater exhibition (graduation show for the Falmouth MA Photography programme, held at therprintspace Gallery in Spitalfields), which was useful in seeing how my project work (one image) will appear in relation to other work from the degree programme.
An inter-generational collaborative exploration of community engagement with urban regeneration and responses to local changes in the built and natural environment.
Methods/methodology: collaborative image making to build a collective understanding of individual and community experience of regeneration through visual exploration and expression; participant image making and assisted portraits; collection and analysis of narratives, documents and artefacts.
Preliminary work (Week Five). Workshop with Lewis Bush on investigative techniques, background research on current regeneration projects in Barking and Dagenham, meeting with Barking and Dagenham Heritage Preservation Group (BDHPG), arrangements for image making and anticipated form and presentation of outcomes.
Week 6: Bookbinding workshop 1 at London Centre for Book Arts. Archive work at Valence House (historic images of town centre and riverside areas). Collection of planning documents and developer literature. Image making at Thames Ward Community Project (TWCP) residents summit, and making contacts for subsequent work. Meetings with the headteachers of schools involved to arrange project work in September.
Week 7: Bookbinding workshop 2 at London Centre for Book Arts. Set up participant image making activity with BDHPG. Preliminary portrait work. Printing of work for Arles.
Week 8: Arles meet up and portfolio review. Review of BDHPG participant images and identification of places for rephotographing. Portraits made. Narratives discussed. Response to feedback received.
Week 9: Bookbinding workshop 3 at London Centre for Book Arts. Re- photography done. Composites made and discussed with participants.
Week 10: Selection and printing of images. Design of booklet/archive. Design of exhibition/installation
Week 11: Production of booklet/archive dummy. Production of installation/exhibition material.
Outcomes. Participants images relating to redevelopment of the area, how this relates to their lived experience and how it relates to their aspirations. Assisted portraits of participants. Composites from rephotographs and archive photographs. Accompanying participant narratives, documents and images. Book dummy and installation (or online presentation). Explore possible pop-up exhibition in the Barking Hotel (threatened with demolition in the redevelopment of the town centre).
Relationship with FMP. This will act as preliminary for work my FMP as described in research proposal and updated in my CRJ. The work will be extended by subsequent work in schools and other community groups. The work done in this module will enable my approach to be tested.
It’s been a busy week, with the collaborative zine activity to complete and the 24 hour ‘Hands Off!’ activity. Plus exhibitions in Sydney, 30 hours in the air crossing continents, and guest lectures and webinars. The feedback I have received on my work and plans for the FMP have been reassuring, and I feel confident that I am well prepared for that (as long as I can get all the preliminary work done in the next two weeks, which will be tricky with a book manuscript to deliver, and an introduction to write, in 10 days time). There are also sensitive political issues to address. My major concern is determining the focus for my WIP portfolio for this module, and this will be the focus for my one-to-one tutorial with Cemre on Monday.
Anthony Luvera’s presentation was insightful. Luvera sees his work as a direct descendant of the participatory and critical photography of the Camerawork/Half Moon/Cockpit era (I knew Jo Spence, did my darkroom work at Camerawork and worked for many years with the Director of the Cockpit from that period, so know this work, and its political context and orientation, well). He places equal emphasis on the process of production and the outcomes. His presentation raised interesting issues about the ethics of participatory photography (especially in relation to the regulation of social research, and differences in ethical expectations, for instance in managing risks to the participants), and about authorship (on which he was resolute about the importance of including appropriate attribution to artist in co-authored work, for instance, assisted portraits). Having moved from using photography as an educator, both in classrooms and in the training of teachers, to placing greater emphasis on my own work as a photographer/artist, it was good to be able to position my previous work and my current practice in relation to what Luvera and others are doing. The question of authorship and attribution wasn’t quite resolved for me, and I have to think more about how I attribute work appropriately in the FMP project.
Through his journal ‘Photography for Whom‘ he intends to make visible some of the cultural history of participatory photography; it might be productive to submit a paper which explores the relationship between the fields of photography and education in the development of this work, and the impact of the different forms of institutionalisation of practice, and careers, between these fields. The point he raised about the impersonal nature of the literature and other material available to the providers and recipients of social care, and the inaccessibility of these services, is very important, and his project ‘Frequently Asked Questions‘ is an imaginative, critical and effective way of addressing this.
The zine activity was interesting, and reinforced the importance of clear communication, sense of direction and responsibility in any collaborative project. The resulting zine is successful, in the sense that the images and intent are interesting and consistent, and the final online booklet works well. The activity does, for me, raise questions about the extent to which the spirit of the zine (cheap, lo-fi, accessible, counter-cultural, from and for the community etc) has been lost, or diluted, and the distinction between the zine and the photo-book eroded (again, worth re-visiting Simon Norfolk’s (2019) view of photo-books as indulgent vanity). The final booklet can be found here.
The reflection brief asks for statements about personal practice and methodology, which I think I have addressed elsewhere. In terms of moving my project forward, the next couple of weeks will involve getting approval and making arrangements with key stakeholders, and refining the form the activities will take and working towards achieving the practical competence required (for instance, in the use of the 5×4 in the field, and processing in ecologically low impact ways).
Looking at Luvera’s current working practices has also encouraged me to look at tethering in making assisted portraits. The 24hr activity has opened up two other forms of image that could be used in my FMP (Google satellite images and electronic microscope images). The workshop with Lewis Bush on Saturday should also help me work through what kind of documents and other data I should include in presentation of the FMP (and in the process).
References
Norfolk, S. 2019. Interviewed by Ben Smith. A Small Voice [podcast], 107, 12th June 2019.
This image of ‘a person who does not exist’ is created by two adversarial AI systems – one creates faces and the other detects flaws (ie. it looks for faces it detects to be artificial). Working together they refine the collective ability of the system to produce artificial faces. You can see the system in operation here.
Info on how it works is here and there is an article about the use of these faces in social media here.
The images themselves are produced without direct human intervention. The systems are, however, produced by humans, and the images are created from other images, some of which have been created by humans (and others by capture systems such as CCTV).
Increasingly deep learning AI systems are being trained using images,
such as the deep convolutional neural network platform DeepMind, which
learns through ‘observation’ of massive collections of images. Humans
are, of course, involved in this, not just in the creation of the
systems, but also in originating (some) or the images and being the
subjects of (some) of the images. As MacKensie and Munster (2019) point
out, not only do images we post on platforms such as Facebook feed into
these collections, but the image capture chips on the devices we use
(such as smart phones) prepare the images we make for this process (of
image data extraction).
‘The A11 Bionic released in 2017, iPhone 8’s chip, is optimized for image and video signal processing with a 64-bit and 6-core processor. But it is also optimized to work for machine learning using Apple’s CoreML platform. This ‘platform’ (in a localized sense) enhances image and facial recognition among its raft of AI capabilities, which also include object detection and natural language processing.’ (p.13)
These devices are perhaps more accurately viewed not as cameras, but as image sensors that produce data in a chain of operations in the formation of AI neural networks. It’s not that humans are not involved in the making of images that is changing, but rather how we are involved and what is ultimately created in the process of image/data production when we ‘take a picture’ with these kinds of digital devices.
It was interesting to do this task (seeking ‘non-human’ sources of images) alongside listening to Simon Norfolk’s reflections on the redundancy and poverty of contemporary photographic practice (and education) in his interview with Ben Smith (A Small Voice podcast, 12th June 2019). Both reinforce the need to adopt a relational view of photography, which acknowledges differences between the fields in which photographic images are made, circulated, deployed and consumed, and manner in which what we consider photography to be (and to be able to do) is transformed as we move between contexts and domains of practice. I’ll pick up the issues raised in the Norfolk interview, and relate these to my own project and practice, in a subsequent post.
References
MacKenzie, A. & Munster, A. 2019. Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities. Theory, Culture & Society. Advance online publication [https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508]
Norfolk, S. 2019. Interviewed by Ben Smith. A Small Voice [podcast], 107, 12th June 2019.
This work was produced as part of the Week 4 activity Hands Off!: ‘you have 24 hours to produce a mini-series of five images relating to your research project, without using apparatus that is familiar to you’. My project, which address community engagement with urban regeneration, has recently taken on an environmental dimension. This is provoked by an emotional response to the ecological violence of large scale urban development projects and engagement with work on the relationship between mental well-being and the built and natural environment (the ‘neuropolis’ – see Fitzgerald et al, 2018) and different understandings of the relationship between communities and the land held in Aboriginal cultures (see Pascoe, 2014). Buttrose (2019), in her curatorial notes to an exhibition exploring the transformation of the Australian landscape, observes that ‘throughout ‘Material Place’ there is a recurring motif of ‘zooming in and out’ suggesting that both macroscopic and microscopic viewpoints need to be captured concurrently to understand the complexity of the world today’. So, in this challenge I have combined two image making strategies that I haven’t used before: (i) screenshots from Google satellite of the areas I am exploring, made on Wednesday morning; (ii) iPhone digital microscope images of organic material collected from these sites on the same day. I have presented these as diptychs.
Andrew Brown, Gascoigne Estate Diptych #1, 2019
Andrew Brown, Gascoigne Estate Diptych #2, 2019
Andrew Brown, Riverside Estate Diptych #1, 2019
Andrew Brown, Riverside Estate Diptych #2, 2019
Andrew Brown, Thamesview Estate Diptych #1, 2019
I am not sure where I’ll take this. I’ve always liked the Boyle family work (see Boyle, 1970), and it would be good to do something like that which engages directly with the ground/land (they chose sites randomly). My desk is covered in bugs. I’ve done some quick channel mixing of images from the same site, just to see how it looks – a couple of examples below.
Andrew Brown, Gascoigne Estate Macro/Micro Composite #1, 2019
Andrew Brown, Thamesview Estate Macro/Micro Composite #1, 2019
References
Boyle, M. 1970. ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’. Online at
http://www.boylefamily.co.uk/boyle/texts/index.html [accessed 26.06.19]
Buttrose, E. 2019. Material Place: Reconsidering Australian Landscapes [Curatorial notes]. UNSW Galleries, Sydney. 21.06.19-07.09.19
Fitzgerald, D., Rose, N. and Singh, I. 2018. ‘Living Well in the Neuropolis’, The Sociological Review, 64: 221–237.
Pascoe, B. 2014. Dark Emu. Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books.
