Tag: LO7

Royal Academy, 18th November 2019

Not primarily photography focused, but interesting in relation to my theme of community engagement with the arts. I accompanied a group of 50 Level 2 and 3 Art and Design students from Barking and Dagenham College on an evening visit to the Gormley exhibition. This included entry to the exhibition and a number of workshops exploring themes from the exhibition and from Gormley’s work more broadly.

The exploration of the body in/as space/place relates to one aspect of my project. For Gormley, two dimensional work acts as a precursor to (but not studies for) his final three dimensional pieces. It was particularly interesting to see his sketchbooks, in which he has worked through and sketched out ideas for potential work (some of which is included in the exhibition).

These are displayed as four chronological periods, and there are distinct differences in form and content over time. The most recent notebooks are more dense, and contain schematics for exhibitions as well as exploratory drawings and text for new works. My own exploratory work tends to be in the form of photographs, and my notebooks (I am keeping a notebook specifically for the FMP) are predominantly textual. I am coming from photography and writing to visual arts, and therefore drawing is not a foundational practice (as it is for others on the course, who have had a more conventional arts education). This prompts me to explore more visual forms of exploration and preparation for photograph work (for instance, in understanding what makes particular combinations of images work in the channel mixing process, and how I might plan the production of images more effectively for this process – important in using large format film. Weirdly, this is on the shelf next to me in the library as I write this.

A message to get more visual: my notebooks should become sketchbooks. In a conversation today, a photographer friend (who followed the conventional art school route) observed that I was using the MA as a kind of foundation course, which I suppose I am.

The workshops offered to the students were loosely structured and exploratory (using clay, exploring augmented reality, life drawing, making zines and 3D montages). The students were great, and really got involved, and seemed to enjoy the experience. It raised for me, though, the question about how to engage the public with art practice, in a way that gives greater access to the principles of production of artistic work (particularly important for those who, perhaps, don’t have the same degree of social and cultural capital as others who feel more at ease in these settings). The experience certainly seemed to make an institution like the RA more accessible. The scale of the education programme is remarkable, with workshops running every Monday and a target of 1000 participants per evening (it is sponsored by BNP Paribas, who cover the cost of transport and food, as well as the workshops). The group from the college that went on an earlier trip were fortunate to have a workshop run by Gormley himself.

Today I am exploring the possibility of exhibiting work and running a workshop at a local community arts and maker space. The challenge is to design the workshop in a way that engages participants in collaborative activity and also gives them confidence and agency as producers of artistic/photographic work, which requires a balance between guidance and autonomy, and a sharing of expertise.

UCL Institute of Making, 19th November 2019

‘The path of least resistance leads to elegant solutions’ Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies.

Seminar with Frances Scott, and showing/discussion of her film PHX [X is for Xylonite]. The film is the outcome of a collaborative project between UCL and Bow Arts focussing on plastics in the industrial heritage of the River Lea area. There was also an exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery and a publication (Vickers and Hill, 2019). The project provides a good example of a multi-disciplinary exploration of a theme (in this case plastics), spanning the arts, sciences and social sciences. It also focuses on a specific area of east London and explores the industrial history of the area around Hackney Wick (which includes buildings, now demolished, that I photographed in the first module). Frances works with a Bolex hand cranked camera and 100 ft reels of 16mm film, which she bucket processes. The use of film here is apposite as Xylonite (Ilford bought Xylonite for the process) came to be rebranded as celluloid, the material base for film. The film incorporates archival material and accounts. Objects from collections are incorporated by 3D laser scanning (fast scanning leads to degraded object images, mirroring the decaying of early plastic objects) and photogrammetry. The work is created by a process of ‘stitching together’. Frances tends to ‘let the material determine the process’.

Local people were involved in the steering group, and visits to archives and local sites were organised. Polymer chemists and other experts were involved in the process. An exhibition was organised around museum objects and artistic responses to these by Slade students.

References

Vickers, N. and Hill, S. (eds) 2019. Raw Materials: Plastics (Exploring the industrial heritage of the River Lea through a series of materials). London: Bow Arts.

RPS, Bristol, 16th November 2019

Very fortunate to have a tour of the exhibition with Curator Mark Rawlinson and then attend a panel discussion with Jack Latham, Erla Bolladóttir and Gísli Guðjónsson as part of the Falmouth MA meet-up in Bristol. There are a number of issues raised by the exhibition and discussion that are important for my own project.

The first relates to the relationship between Latham’s photographs, archival (including police) photographs, texts and artefacts. These are combined to suggest not just that that there are multiple conflicting accounts, but that accounts (and the place of photography in relation to these) are contingent, uncertain and unstable. Whilst some of Latham’s photographs revisit earlier archival images, they do not remake, or rephotograph, places and scenes, but rather revisit and re-present the place. In some cases, the places have undergone dramatic change, in other cases images of the people, and things, that now populate the landscape are presented. Images are presented out of sequence and in different forms and formats, to disorientate and disrupt in the manner of the forms of interrogation utilised. The materials provide a resource for, but don’t dictate, the construction of narratives. As Latham stated in discussion, he wants to thwart our tendency to ‘bend images to fit narratives’. Alongside each other the different forms of material prompt us to raise questions, rather than constitute a single narrative or an unambiguous description. In my own project I have to think carefully about the relationship between different elements, and the complex relationships between people, places, things and different accounts.

The second relates to the relationship between the different realisations of the project. The exhibition and the book are clearly very different ways of engaging with the work (and the discussion between the photographer and other participants in the project is yet another). Moving around the gallery makes the investigation of the narratives easier than the linear structure of the book. The scale of of the photographs and the juxtaposition in space are also to the fore in the gallery space (pictures are in clusters, next to each other, opposite each other, obscured and revealed by movement around the space. On the other hand, the book offers a tactile experience, accentuated by the use of different papers (including sugar-paper), gatefolds and french folds, loose images, text on transparent papers and so on. This mirrors my earlier discussion of the the relationship between film Island and the related installation.

The third aspect relates to the relationship between the photographer and the participants in the project (also raised in the guest lecture by Sebastian Bruno this week, who initially made his work with minimal engagement with the community, but latterly has adopted a more collaborative approach). The project required close collaboration with the people imprisoned and those involved in seeking justice. Latham mentioned that he sought the agreement of the people involved before the final edit of the book was approved (he arranged to have a meal with everyone and went through the edit with them). This emphasised the importance of engaging collaborators in deciding the form that are taken by the outcomes of the project.

The fourth relates to consideration of what it is possible for photography to achieve, and how it might contribute to a multi-disciplinary investigation (such as this project, which involves psychologists, forensic investigators, ‘conspiracy theorists’ and others). Latham is clear about the limitations of photography to tell stories, and raises questions, for me, about whether ‘telling stories’ should be a primary aspiration for photographers. Rawlinson refers to Allan Sekula’s advocacy of the use of sequences of photographs through which to create a narrative. Latham’s work operates in a different way. His aesthetically and technically accomplished images are woven into the other material to produce multiple narratives. Their contribution is distinct, and arguably could not have been achieved by any other form expression/(re)presentation. The images alone do not form a narrative, nor do they provide, in themselves, illumination or analysis. They do, though, draw us into engagement with the people and places depicted, and their part in the overall complex of narratives. They also disrupt assumptions about placed he passage of time. The success of this, for me, has its foundations in Latham’s modesty about what photography alone can achieve, and inquisitiveness about how these achievements can be enhanced within a multi-disciplinary, and multi-modal, project. This is at the heart of my own project, which seeks to explore what, distinctively, photography can contribute, both as a practice and outcomes, in multi- and inter-disciplinary work.

UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lecture, 14th November 2019

MIRRA (Memory-Identity-Rights in Records-Access) is a participatory action research project exploring access to records for people who grew up in care. Care-leavers commonly have gaps in their memories of childhood, and lack images and artefacts from periods of their lives. Care records provide a potential source of material. However, the records kept by local authorities and others concerned with the management of care describe the trajectories of children in a way which is designed to meet bureaucratic requirements, without any concern for the voices of the ‘subjects’ of these records. The project helps care-leavers not only access their care records, but also interpret the records and emotionally come to terms with what is recorded, how it is recorded and what is not recorded. It also campaigns for more human-centred (rather than bureaucratic) forms of record keeping. The relevance to my project is that these records constitute an official bureaucratic account of the minutiae of everyday life by the ‘corporate parent’ in the interests of compliance, and as a result present a particular form of description of individual lives (a ‘paper self’) on which important decisions are made. This is similar to the role of quantitative data in housing development in the areas I am exploring. In the same way that I am trying to use photographic art to produce a counter to this, the project is seeking a more ‘human-centred’ form of record keeping, and in particular, a way of recording the life courses of looked after children that gives voice, and ownership, to these children, which has the capacity to hold ‘personal memory objects’ (such as photographs and valued objects). When the records are requested by individuals, they are usually in heavily redacted form, with large sections of text blacked out for confidentiality reasons. This is unsettling for care leavers, in giving the impression that there are aspects of their own lives, and decisions that have been made and recorded, that are being deliberately withheld from them.

The attempt being made here to question official forms of record keeping (and the image of a person that is projected as a result of this) and to develop a way of keeping records that gives greater voice an agency to the person and more appropriately, and openly, provides an account of their lives, resonates with my project. At the community level this is similar to the images of a community projected by accounts given, for instance, in compulsory purchase orders and through quantitative social progress indicators, a raises the question of how communities can record and communicate who they are and what they do, and within this the role that can be played by photographic images (and the practices of photography).

A further issue concerns the move to digital forms of record keeping, which has had the effect of fragmenting and obscuring accounts. Agencies rarely use the same systems for making digital records, and often these are incompatible making it difficult to compile a single consistent record. This is further compounded by the out-sourcing of care to private and third sector agencies, whose records may not be in the public domain and thus not allow right of access. The proposal made by the project is for the co-creation of records, and ownership for the individual. A physical (analogue/material) form would seem most appropriate, given that development of a common digital system is unlikely, and the limitations of digital forms for evocation of memory and longer term transportability across systems and formats. This brings to mind the use of portable archives and meaningful objects by migrant communities.

Paul Strohm (2014), in Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, identifies the cultivation of, and through performance direct engagement with, an audience, as vital to the practice and status of the medieval poet. In moving from London to Kent, Chaucer lost his audience, albeit intimate and small in number. His solution, in Strohm’s account, was novel and transformative. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer created his own audience for his writing within the text itself, by making the thirty pilgrims an audience for, and commentators on, each other’s stories. The pilgrims come from different walks of life, and the stories differ in form and content. In seeking a form of direct address to mobilise his narrative, Chaucer’s artistic breakthrough is, according to Strohm, to create ‘a body of ambitiously mixed participants suitable for a collection of tales unprecedented in their variety and scope … a portable audience’ (227) enabling Chaucer to produce a work of art that places itself ‘beyond the vagaries of time and circumstance’ (228). ‘The idea starts with a mixed company of Pilgrim tale-tellers. From this mixed company issues the form of the work: It will be serial, multivoiced, stylistically mixed, many-themed, and contentious’ (228).

I’m reflecting on this as I plan the protocols for working with different groups on my micro-projects. It prompts me to consider the extent to which diversity both within and between groups can be reflected in the forms of visual outcomes. Chaucer’s literary strategy provides a way of managing this diversity, in constituting each group as both producers and an audience for, and interlocutors with, what is produced. This allows the space, in each group, to produce diverse forms of constituent images and collective outcomes, and makes the fieldwork a generative enterprise. The outcomes will be ‘multivoiced, stylistically mixed, many-themed’ and are likely to be ‘contentious’ (particularly where the perceptions and experiences of individuals and groups lie in opposition to, or diverge from, those of, for instance, the local authority and developers). The work produced is thus presented to an audience in the process of production, and potentially transformed. It is formalised in the creation of a pop-up exhibition, with the prospect of enlarging the audience. The outcomes are unlikely to be serial, in the sense of a manuscript of Chaucer’s work, unless the constituent projects are presented, in part or whole, as books or other linear forms (which presents another dimension of challenge).

Thinking of the groups and the work produced in these terms strengthens the collaborative nature of the process, and allows the meaningful production of a range of forms of image. It also reinforces the poetic/lyrical nature of the project (rather than the third party construction and mediation of narratives).

Related posts

Looking back into the future to the end of time: post-humanism and the photography of Hitoshi Sugimoto

Narrative and ‘The Tyranny of Story’

The challenge of storytelling

References

Paul Strohm (2014), Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, New York: Viking.

Kim Boske

http://www.kimboske.com

At Unseen, I was immediately drawn to Boske’s black and white ‘Snow’ (2015) for its similarity, in look, to my monochrome manipulation of channel mixing. This was exhibited as a 153×103 cm C-print in artist’s frame (in an edition of seven prints plus two artist’s prints).

Whilst the form of layering suggests a similar process of production (and the more recent ‘untitled B/W’ series bears even closer similarity), looking at other colour work suggests that a different technique is used.

Boske states that she is ‘fascinated by how different moments in time and space determine our perspective and define reality’ and by ‘a way of thinking that presents itself more as “becoming” rather than “being”’ producing a ‘collection of afterimages taken from past and present, together constructing an image of ‘now’, revealing a phenomenon that is impossible to see or witness with the naked eye’. She sees art and nature as in dialogue and ‘entwined’ and states that her work is ‘basically an investigation of time and space’ informed by reading Deleuze and Bergson [artist’s website]. The human figure is absent from the images, only implied through the process of capture of the constituent moments that combine to make the final image. There is clearly resonance with my composites, but Boske focuses only on the ‘natural’ (not built environment, nor human activity). I’d like to explore this further, particularly the use of colour, and maybe experiment with the juxtaposition of natural/built/human images of this sort (rather than combining these within one image, though I think conceptually this works better).

It was also interesting to see the work she has done that is presented as large prints suspended on wires (not framed).

Whilst Boske explores the becoming of the natural (and implies some sense of continuity) my interest is in exploration of entwining as a core component of the process of change, and the instability and unpredictability of this process as a result of interaction between the natural, built and human (and the ultimate negation of those categories as distinct).

The work reinforces, for me, that the composites are tenable as a visual form, but that I need to explore further ways of presenting the work. Interestingly, Boske also produces animations, displayed on LCD panels, as well as large prints.

The major benefit of putting the research proposal together for me has been drawing up a provisional timeline for the completion of the work. The nature of the project means that I have to leave the possible outputs fairly open, but the major milestones are clear. Here’s the full proposal. The timeline is below. Important to keep this under review (and assess the impact of any slippage).

Final-Project-Proposal-AB

Planning and set up
(23rd September 2019 to 20th October 2019)

Week 1 Unseen Amsterdam. Meetings with partners and participants, making images for the community, community day, demonstration.
Week 2 PK presentation and first tutorial. Planning session at school. Visit exhibition spaces.
Week 3 Meeting with Barking and Dagenham College. London Prosperity Board meeting. Initial briefing of community groups and schools.
Week 4 Submission of Final Project Proposal. Archive work at Valance House.

Collaborative image making and micro projects
(21st October to 15th December 2019)

Week 5 Workshops and fieldwork.
Week 6 Workshops and fieldwork. Feedback on Final Project Proposal.
Week 7 Workshops and fieldwork.
Week 8 Workshops and fieldwork. MPF/RPS group meeting (Bristol).
Week 9 Workshops and fieldwork. Magnum weekend workshop with Sim Chi Yin.
Week 10 Workshops and fieldwork.
Week 11 Workshops and fieldwork.
Week 12 Workshops and fieldwork.

Series of workshops and photographic fieldwork with the following groups: Greatfields School, Barking and Dagenham College, Thames Ward Community Programme, Thames View Residents Association, Thames Reach Residents Association, New View Arts, Eastside Community Heritage, Barking and Dagenham Heritage Conservation Group. Each series will have a specific focus relating to community and regeneration determined by the group.

Composite image-making and preparation for pop-up exhibitions and simple publications
(16th December 2019 to 12th January 2020)

Week 13 Collation of images
Week 14 Creation of composites
Week 15 Printing and preparation of outputs
Week 16 Initial sequencing and layout

Sharing of composites, feedback, pop-up exhibitions and preparation of cumulative outcomes
(13th January 2020 to 23rd February 2020)

Week 17 Selection and exhibition layout with participants
Week 18 Preparation of publications with participants
Week 19 Preparation of publications with participants
Week 20 Pop-up exhibitions
Week 21 Pop-up exhibitions
Week 22 Reflection and follow-up with participants

Final outcomes: exhibition, artists book/archive and presentation
(24th February 2020 to 5th April 2020)

Week 23 Finalisation of outcomes
Week 24 Exhibition
Week 25 Exhibition. Falmouth workshops and portfolio review
Week 26 [Canterbury Elder Care]
Week 27 [Singapore Expert Panel]
Week 28 Public presentations

Preparation of FMP submission
(6th April 2020 to 1st May 2020)

Week 29 Review CRJ and online portfolio
Week 30 Finalise Critical Review of Practice
Week 31 Finalise Project pdf
Week 32 Submit Project pdf and Critical Review of Practice

‘I know it is invevitible progress, and I’m invested in the digital world as much as the next person. This is not my point: cinema made with film and shown as film is very different from cinema made and shown digitally. Within art this is mostly understood, because the world of art has appreciated medium specificity since before the Renaissance: Giotto’s mural is a fresco, conceived, made and seen differently from an oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci; we understand that an etching is not a watercolour and a drawing, not a relief; they are made differently and the experience of seeing them and handling them is different. They might share the same content, the same images and even be copies of one another, but they are not the same. However, they are still pictures. But for some reason there is a cultural blindness towards the difference between film and digital: a blindness with an underbelly of commercial intent that is invested in seeing one replace by the other so the difference can be quickly forgotten. Both film and digital are pictures, perhaps copies of one another, but they are not the same thing – one is light on emulsion and one is light made by pixel, and they are also conceived, made and seen differently’ (Dean, 2011: 16)

Dean, T. 2011. Film. In Cullinan, N. (ed.) Tacita Dean: Film. London: Tate Publishing. 15-48

Festival Programme 2019

My second year at this event, and a good opportunity to think again about the relationship between film and photography, common issues in both, and seek out ideas and work that help me to think through my own project.

Research as Creative Practice

The focus of the discussion was principally exploration of the extent to which non-fiction film making could be considered to be research, fuelled perhaps by the association of all three panel members with universities, and concerns around what counts for the Research Excellence Framework, and other measures of research productivity. Each panelist presented examples from their work, each of which had some resonance with my own. Brett Story’s The Hottest August is formed around casual conversation around New York during a heatwave, starting with the question ‘what are your hopes for the future’, creating a sense of the anxieties of people at this particular place and point in time. Whether or not this constitutes research, it does provide some insight, and uses visual (and audio) means to capture these encounters and engage and provoke the viewer. For me, it raises the question of the capability of photography to do capture everyday activity in this way. The method used is interesting as well – walking around with a camera and sound rig and asking the question to whoever you encounter, something that could certainly be done with still photography (though, interestingly, it might be more difficult to explain as an activity – the higher visibility of the video and audio rig giving a much clearer initial message about what is going on and what is expected of the participants; presumably permission are sought after the event). The idea of the production of an archive of the present, through these conversations with strangers, is interesting. A still image cannot do the same thing, but it can sit alongside other artefacts and media in a way that extended video cannot. This relates back to an earlier discussion provoked by Stephen Heath’s presentation at last year’s festival: the relative advantages of the installation over the film (in this case, his film Island). An enduring question, for those working in any media, is ‘who are you in this encounter?’

Bo Wang‘s Many Undulating Things explores spatial inequality in Hong Kong, starting and ending in a shopping centre, and exploring different kinds of public and private spaces (from housing projects to commercial warehouses). Interesting issues here include the difficulties in gaining access to privately owned land (and ways of subverting this) and the nature of the encounters with people (and rejections), leading in some cases to verbal interactions off-camera, but on sound track (interesting to explore with still images, with either text or audio). The primary focus of the film is on the experience of social and physical space, and the bodily experience of inhabited space, questions that are implicit in my work, but should perhaps be more explicit.

Interesting discussion, and resonates with my own approach to using photography as a means of investigation and interrogation (as research) rather than seeing research as just a precursor to visual work. How this might then contribute to inter-disciplinary research programmes remains a core question (which will be addressed again in future posts).

Masterclass: Mila Turajlic on Filming a Nation

https://www.othersideofeverything.com/

Raised interesting questions about the use of archives, and what happens when a country ceases to exist and archives are scattered. Also about the creating and maintaining spaces for dialogue (and the manner in which polarisation destroys this, constantly asking the question ‘whose side were you on?’). Who do you trust to tell the story of the past? On working in the archive ‘Every day in the archive is a shooting day for the Director’ (ie, creating content).

Films and shorts

I booked a session to view a selection of films and shorts, including the following (of particular relevance to my project).

Here for Life, Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Adrian Jackson, 2019

https://www.fugitiveimages.org.uk/projects/here-for-life-2019/

Collaborative film with ten Londoners, where individual stories blend one into the other. A number of scenes that provoke thoughts for my own project (i) posing in front of developer CGIs on hoardings; (ii) conversations between local people and site workers; (iii) darkened interiors, street scenes, court converted into a hotel; (iv) flickering between the poetic and the mundane; (v) acting on and in the world; (vi) privatisation of the land; (vii) sequestering of labour; (viii) juxtaposition of folk song and demonstrations; (ix) production of a community play. Most importantly, has provoked me to go back to earlier work by Zimmerman and Fugitive Images around Haggerston.

On the Border: Yoshiki Nishimura, 2018. Japan. 7’

Visually arresting photogrammetric rendering of beach debris with soundtrack.

E-ticket. Simon Liu. 2019. Hong Kong, UK. 13’

Cut up archive of 35mm film, 16k splices, spliced together in rigid increments. Good to think about in relation to the animations I have made from composites.