Nicky Bird

From the series Archaeology of the Ordinary by Nicky Bird.

Nicky Bird is a photographic artist whose work is primarily concerned with social histories and how they are relevant today. Found photographs, the archive and forgotten sites have informed and impacted her work.  Her approach to these subjects are intriguing; from bidding on unwanted family photos on eBay to unearthing writing on cottage walls, she creatively brings hidden stories to our attention.

This interview will primarily discuss Question for Seller and Archaeology of the Ordinary.  Question for Seller began when Nicky bid on family photographs that she saw no-one wanted on eBay.  The project resulted in an exhibition of these purchased photographs alongside some background information from the seller.  As part of an exhibition at Belfast Exposed there was a live auction where people could bid on the works, raising new and interesting questions as the pictures are arguably now deemed to be ‘art’ rather than unwanted family photos.

Archaeology of the Ordinary is a fascinating foray into discarded territory and memory.  In looking at marks left on their homes by migrant farm workers and later installing parts of the actual cottages into a gallery, this work poignantly presents what would be forgotten histories to a contemporary audience.

Nicky is based in Scotland where, as well as continuing her practice, she is a PhD co-ordinator at Glasgow School of Art.  Her work has been exhibited extensively and was recently included in Seduced by Art at the National Gallery, which is currently touring in Spain.

Can you remember where your interest in ‘found photographs’ derived from?

How to talk about this – and to then define that moment – depends on what we think ‘found photographs’ are. For lots of people this expression summons up the discarded analogue family snap, so the most obvious example would be the first group of photographs I bought on eBay that eventually led to the work ‘Question for Seller’ 2006. They were of an African American woman, with studio portraits of a couple of soldiers, and a snap of a car from the 1940s. I couldn’t believe they were on eBay, at such a low price and I was the only person to bid on them. An earlier moment I would point to – which brings a slightly different meaning to the ‘found photograph’ – is towards the end of my PhD (1998), I was in a picture archive in the US. On another table was a contact sheet of Elvis Presley in the 1950s, at a formal dinner table surrounded by immaculately dressed women. There was a picture editor’s pencil mark around his head – indicating the part of the photo they wanted to use. This cropping revealed in an instant the value of the picture and how they weren’t interested in the unidentified group of women. These issues interest me – so whether it is a photograph in its entirety or parts of photographs that are sort of thrown away, what other things do we throw out with them?

What is it about this type of imagery that interests you so much?

I think – along with many others – there is a fascination for vernacular ‘family’ photographs that have been removed for unknown reasons from their original context, and names of the person, the photographer, are also lost. Particularly with analogue photographs, the fact you can hold it in your hand, whilst looking at the content, brings home that this is part of someone’s ‘life,’ and connects you to history, even if specifics are missing, and you might not fully understand what you are looking at. Also the typicality of format, time periods etc, means that a viewer not personally connected to the subject might recognize their own family history in them. The issue for myself as an artist is how do they connect with contemporary life, and the questions again lie in the action of finding the photographs, so the context in which they are ‘found’ becomes an important part of the work so for example, in Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place it was how the family photograph and a new landscape photograph revealed physical erasures of personal history, and this was connected to economic decline and regeneration – so a family ‘snap’ becomes connected to a bigger picture…

From the series Question for Seller by Nicky Bird.

Throwing away old family photographs feels fundamentally wrong! Perhaps that’s because I’m a photographer.  Did you have that sense when you began this project and did you feel like you brought some purpose back to those abandoned photographs, through the live auction and simply by making people look at them on a gallery wall?

The process of collecting family photographs on eBay certainly began with a rescue impulse, particularly as I set myself a rule – that I would only bid on items nobody else wanted.  They were below a certain price and whatever the seller told me in reply to my question ‘how did you come across these…’ was important. eBay (through price, location, one bidder and seller’s reply) then provided an alternative meaning to each batch, and each obviously added collectively to the overall project. So even when some of the batches were displayed on gallery walls, the information from eBay was an important part of the work. I think audiences were taken aback by the fact they were all found on eBay, and what their ‘market value’ was. The album I made was auctioned off on eBay, at the same time all the batches on display were auctioned off live – this was important to follow the logic of ‘market value’ right through to the end.

On the matter of throwing things away, eBay is interesting as a sort of house clearance – in one way the photos can be seen as thrown away, but in another sense, it is a type of postponement i.e. why do people not just throw these photos in the bin? In fact, one eBay seller had rescued a batch of photographs from a skip, while another said that eBay sellers and buyers were new ‘custodians now’ for such materials… so it was interesting that both examples (the brutal and the benign) had a presence in Question for Seller.

Gay Interest Beefcake worked in a different way where I noticed an eBay seller had split up a relative’s set of photographs into three lots. The seller also speculated on his relative’s possible gay – hidden – history, so that became about restoring the original set, creating an album with the seller’s statements, which effectively ‘queer’ quite ordinary photographs. That went on eBay too, and the mystery buyer turned out to be the International Center of Photography in New York. It’s nice to think that queer history via eBay are now being looked after in this collection….

There is a tension in your work between who we are today and how that connects to our personal and familial histories.  What is it about your past that is important to you as an artist today?

For me it is connected with class, particularly working class histories that lie on peripheries – whether that’s a photograph, edge of a building or a remnant in a rural location. There is a debt to feminism here – which is about looking out for the overlooked, questioning what’s valued (or not), creating new spaces to listen, reading against the grain and so on. There are a number of other artists concerned with hidden or alternative histories (gender, race, etc) and we might turn out to a certain age/generation. But the histories have to ‘speak’ to the present day in someway; that’s the artist’s ‘job’ if you like. I see my work as a form of rescuing something that might be considered mundane, unimportant or even irrelevant.

From the series Archaeology of the Ordinary by Nicky Bird.

Archaeology of the Ordinary reminds me of a childhood experience.  When I was growing up in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast which was practically the country, there were abandoned cottages and houses dotted around the landscape.  I remember being fascinated with these places and the histories they embodied.  I used to spend weekends and evenings trespassing in those dangerous old houses and wonder what types of people lived there.  I would search for traces of past inhabitants in the wallpaper, the abandoned artefacts and the furniture.

That’s interesting as the link with this project was the signatures made on the bothy walls belonged to Irish Migrant workers from the 1950s, mostly men. This project raised some questions for me about the potential limitations of photography. Your experience points to the importance of being a detective, the sense of transgression and an awareness that these places are haunted by history, and also neglect, abandonment isn’t just about the physical site, but what it represents. It also points to the importance of a physical, sometimes visceral encounter with a place. Quite early on in Archaeology of the Ordinary, I realized taking photographs and representing them in a gallery wasn’t enough so that project became about removing, preserving and installing a wall in a gallery that was really destined for the skip.

What do you hope will result by connecting the viewer to the histories you unearth in your work?

I am not alone in drawing attention to what hidden histories are lying about in family albums, or the landscape etc. However I think photography is a great mediator of past and present. I hope that the viewer – when they look at my work – does hear the voices and histories of others, but also recognizes their own – and asks questions about what we value in our culture, and what we don’t.

A conversation with Jan Dibbets

 

Artist : Jan Dibbets
Title : Red
Date(s) : 1976/2012
Dimensions : Framed size 128.7 x 253.7 cm. Edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof.
Material : From New Colour Studies. Colour photograph laminated to Dibond.
Website : www.alancristea.com
Credit : © Jan Dibbets. Courtesy the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery, London

Jan Dibbets, b.1941, is a Dutch conceptual artist who has spent most of his life dedicated to photographic art.  He was one of the first artists to recognise the validity of colour photography as an artistic medium and has continually developed a thinking approach to photography.  The inherent lie of the photograph is of particular interest to him.

For Dibbets, the fundamental goal is to unmask the seemingly self-evident role of photography as a legitimate depiction of the world and to show how even simple operations can expose photography’s illusion.

Brain Wallis (ICP, NY)

His exhibition in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972 established Dibbet’s international reputation.  He has influenced generations of younger photographers both through his own work and his teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy. His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions and is in collections including the Stedlijk, Tate Britain and MOMA.

Dibbets talks to Sharon Boothroyd about his career and what it takes to make photographic art.  This interview was conducted via telephone on Friday 19^th April 2013 and was commissioned for thisistomorrow in light of his recent solo exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery in London from March – April 2013.

SB: Throughout your career what art movements have been the most exciting to witness?

JD: When I was at St Martins I saw a strange sculpture on the roof.  It was by someone that no-one took any notice of – it was by Richard Long, so I sought him out.  I was the first one to recognize Richard Long.  There was no background for it.  In the 1960’s photography and art were not seen to mix.  We had to create our own background – we became the background.

You ask about witnessing art movements but as soon as you witness it, it is over.  The exciting thing is finding someone you think is doing something new and interesting and someone who can correspond to your own ideas.  The exciting thing is making the movements happen. When they are recognised as movements they are over. Then the imitations begin.

What had the most impact on you as a photographic artist? 

Photographic art did not exist.  Only classical photography was promoted; nineteenth century photographs and maybe Man Ray.  Serious thinking about photography hadn’t yet taken place.

The art world consisted of people who had success and those who didn’t.  We detested those who had success and those who didn’t had no way forward. We had to make our own movement, find common spirits.  That was the start of Land Art and Conceptual Art.  All that happened in 1967 -8 and just 3 years later, in 1970, Conceptual Art was over.

Photography began for me when I realized I had to document some of my new outdoor work and looked in the camera for the first time.  I had given up painting.  It came very near to minimal art and it was painful to give up.  I had a strange feeling that I was bringing something completely to an end.  I ended up stacking white canvases, they became sculpture and there was no place for me in painting anymore.  I had to throw everything I learnt out the window, which is not easy of course.

So, in 1967 I picked up a camera and all these ideas about what is real / not real, abstract/ not abstract came together in one machine.  It became my thing and I created, over 2 years, the Perspectives Corrections series.  I really developed an idea about thinking about photography.  Then came the imitator.  A student at St Martins who previously made enormous plastic colour sculptures saw my work and started making works about shutter speed.

What was your response when photographic theory started coming from France in the 1970’s?

It was the revolution after the revolution.  It didn’t have any depth and they didn’t know what they were talking about.  It was a fashion.

From: Perspective Corrections
Colour photograph
Paper 155.5 x 153.4 cm
Image 150 x 150 cm
Edition of 5

What do you think about contemporary photography today?

Hardly anyone is making photography that is interesting to me.  I have a hard time explaining how lonely I have been.  Money dictates the fashion in art instead of the museums and that is a bad thing. Sotheby’s and Christie’s tell us what is good and bad.

Jeff Wall is a great writer, he writes very intelligently, but his art is something else.  He promotes himself very damn well but there is nothing that is interesting to me about what he is doing.  He invented the light bulb behind the picture.  Very good.

People like Reneke Dijkstra or Cindy Sherman are making nice photographs but it’s nothing new – it’s all in the vein of documentary photography.  It’s a very early discipline that is not exciting.  Yes they are taking good pictures but let’s not call it art.  Even the Bechers, good friends of mine and excellent teachers, but boring photographs.  Where is the art?  Not all painters are artists and not all photographers are artists either. Photography is too often about ‘what’ when ‘how’ is the interesting question.

How would you define art photography?

The 21^st century is about thinking about photography not about making it.  Adding more photographs to the archive is not what it’s about.  I heard the average number of photographs in a small archive is now approx 25,000 photographs. My archive is very concentrated, after 45 years it contains about 275 contact sheets. That’s what I call thinking photography.

Every photograph is a lie. It doesn’t represent anything.  Therefore it is both real and abstract.  Photography is very easy and very complicated at the same time.  It’s tricky and in this trick the fascination lies. You need a key and if you are lucky enough to find one it’s like opening Pandora’s Box; tricky and fascinating and dangerous.  It’s a wonderful world photography.  It’s the new painting.

What hopes do you have for the future of photography?

I think the great time for photography is still to come.  Photography is the medium of the future, believe me.  It has yet to develop.  It has a very short history and it is in need of ideas, of thinking about what to do with it and how.  Not just about what to make.  It is such an easy and tricky medium.  You can do anything but nobody knows how.

My idea of photography is something totally different.  Not many understand it but I see a very clear and enormous future for photography.

People think everything has already been done.  When students tell me this I open the door and tell them – ‘Goodbye and don’t come back’.  It is a killing attitude.  You have to surprise yourself.  You can’t blame oil paint that painting is supposedly dead.  In everything, whatever it is can be developed with creativity.

It would be easy to describe your career as prolific and successful.  How do you determine success and how would you advise younger artists to navigate this minefield?

I don’t care about what people say.  Everyone has to sit through this manipulated art world, especially new artists, but if you are self-aware and don’t care about the manipulations, as long as you can live happily and do what you want to do that is already a success.

It was hard for us because photography was not recognised but it is hard for new artists because the market is so driven by money.  So I would tell them to stop making photographs – think first about photography and then make photographs.  It is a struggle.  You have to fight for an idea.

Photography is not a craft any more and if the idea is lacking you get only nice pictures.  Nice pictures are easy but they are not challenging.  Nice pictures are the problem.

From: New Colour Studies
Colour photo-collage mounted onto board
60.0 x 70.0cm
Signed, dated and titled recto in pencil by the artist
Unique

Elina Brotherus Interview

L’Etang, 2012, 90x113cm

From the series 12 ans après by Elina Brotherus.

Elina Brotherus (b. Finland, 1972) went to France to live and work as an artist in residence when she was 27 years old, an outsider without the language. Her series Suite Françaises, made during this time of flux in her life, is described in her own words:

When you do not understand the language spoken around you, you live in a strange state of instability. Language is essential in creating the feeling of basic security. When I arrived in France at the beginning of September, I was barely able to buy myself a subway ticket. This work is an effort to learn a new language, to get acquainted with a new country and a new culture. It tells about “outsiderness”, the incoherence between the person and his environment, and about the simple small means with which one tries to take his place in society…

Language is a way of creating order out of chaos. We give names to objects, classify and categorize things, analyse phenomena. Language makes thinking possible.

Elina Brotherus.

Adopting the post-it note method of language learning (writing words on post-its and posting them on the object as a memory triggering device) Elina not only learnt a language, a culture and became an insider, she created a structure on which to hang a poignant, reflexive and personal piece of work.  One which became universal in its resonance with the human need to belong. She revisited this place at another crucial time in her life (turning 40) and produced 12 ans après. In the following interview she kindly discusses these two pieces of work with me (interviewed on 21 March 2013).

In 12 ans après you returned to the same place where Suite Françaises was made and decided to revisit it photographically too.  What made you want to return (in both senses)?

Officially I returned for a job. I was asked to participate in a programme where photographers are invited to public schools to work with the pupils. I was offered to do a workshop in the same highschool where 12 years earlier I went to French classes together with three immigrant children.

I think the job was a pretext for returning. I had been to Chalon every now and then for a day or two, I have continued to collaborate with Musée Nicéphore Niépce who organised my residency in 1999. But this was an opportunity to stay longer, to throw myself in a situation, to do an experiment on myself. I have noticed that this turning point of being 40 is a bigger issue than I had imagined. It’s a series of irreversible things happening to one. So I felt a need of making a position statement: to look into where I am now, coming from where, what has happened since those early years full of expectations, and what has not happened. Since my residency project in Chalon back in 1999 was dealing with my life and experiences as a young artist, it seemed logical to return to the same place when, after 12 years of doing something else, I returned to an autobiographical approach. I even insisted in having a room in the same guesthouse where I stayed in 1999, instead of sleeping in some hotel.

Chalon-sur-Saône 3, 1999, 80x102cm by Elina Brotherus.

In Suite françaises and, of course, again in 12 ans après the structuring of a series around the post-it note technique of language learning is great because it allows you to use a multitude of visual approaches.  I am particularly drawn to the landscape images.  Can you speak more about the relationship between yourself and the land?

In the Suites françaises of 1999, I started with interiors and still lives. I didn’t see a way of entering the unfamiliar French landscape, until I realised that I can use post-it stickers outdoors as well. The post-it’s made the landscape accessible to me. Since then, ‘figure in a landscape’ type of picture has been what I do most, I guess. In 12 ans après I wanted to follow the landscape method I developed during the residency: to go out with the 4×5″ camera looking for places, without knowing what I might find but feeling the thrill of hoping to find something wonderful. Often the trick is to go out very early or in so-called bad weather. I also went to some places I had photographed in 1999 to do a new version. In Chalon, the river is very present. That’s why it has a big role in the landscape pictures of the series. I never get bored with rivers.

When these are placed within the context of interiors, still lives and self portraits a wider narrative takes hold.  What do you think is the benefit of allowing these styles to interact with each other? 

Precisely what you say: it’s the wider narrative, the full picture, different points of view.

Pleine lune, 2012, 50x73cm by Elina Brotherus.

The isolation of being an outsider was emotionally tangible in the original images.  But a lot happens in 12 years.  What was it like to experience that emotional and geographical place again?  

I was surprised how little I remembered. In some sense 1999 is like yesterday, but on the other hand it felt like it was another person who was there then. My life is elsewhere and so are my problems. Being an outsider in France isn’t my reality anymore: France is my second home. I’m as fluent in French as I am in English, which is not perfect but honestly it’s good enough to enjoy life and conversation on a rather elaborate level. I don’t feel nostalgia for what was 12 years ago. It’s more of a sad constatation of being already at an age where one doesn’t understand where all the years have gone. I regret the missed opportunities and the other lives I could have had but didn’t.

What were the main ways the project expanded after those 12 years?

I’m not so lost as I was at 27. I know more what I want, so making images I’m pleased with is easier. I don’t have to search in the dark.

Les Oranges, 1999, 80x100cm by Elina Brotherus.

In 12 ans après the post-it notes are either gone or include more information.  What does this signify for you?

The things I need to communicate cannot possibly be condensed into a single word. On the other hand, I trust in the image and know it doesn’t necessarily need any words glued on it. Or let’s say that I know the words I need to pronounce, and I know in what photo I can integrate them.

As a result of the varying visual tempos it feels like this project communicates a lot more than perhaps the fluency of a language would.  Do you see photography as a language and is this a metaphor for that?  

There are things photography can communicate in a beautiful, inoffensive and subtle way. I don’t want to say in a richer way than language, because that’s not true for good literature, but in a layered, allusive way that leaves a lot of space for a spectator who wants to enter the work and filter it through his/her own life. I think that through photographs people can really understand each other in a profound way. Perhaps it’s an illusion, but at least it gives me the feeling that human beings are quite similar after all, and that’s something I want to believe.

La Saône 3, 2012, 80x100cm by Elina Brotherus

Notes:

12 ans après was exhibited for the first time at the Lianzhou Photography Festival in China, November 2012, curated by François Cheval, the director of Musée Nicéphore Niépce.

Elina will be exhibiting as part of the Home Truths; Photography and Motherhood exhibition at The Photographers Gallery, curated by Susan Bright this Autumn.

Some upcoming notable shows:

Elina Brotherus: Spectator, Galleria Effearte, Milan, March 22-April 30

Elina Brotherus: Annonciation, gb agency, Paris, May 25-July 20

Elina will also be participating in group shows at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Bogota photography festival and Stadtische Kunstsammlung Waldkreiburg, all this spring.

You might be interested in Elina’s recent publication on a different body of work Artist and her model; find it here.

Michael David Murphy Interview

Unphotographable is a catalog of exceptional mistakes. Photos never taken that weren’t meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished I’d taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.

Michael David Murphy.

I first saw Unphotographable in Brighton as part of the BPF and was intrigued by the idea behind the series.  As photographers and really just as people, most of us can identify with those missed moments.  I can even picture a few of them in my mind now and feel gutted because I know those moments will never come back, no matter how much I try to re-construct them.  What a good idea then, to recreate them in text form, and allow the words to do the talking.  Aside from the missed photo-op this work brought to my mind questions of theoretical interest, relating to the nature of photography as a tool for remembrance and as a record of what may or may not have happened.  It made me wonder whether these texts are more or less reliable than the images would have been themselves.

Michael David Murphy is a photographer and writer based in America.

I have a terrible long term memory, which may be partly why I’m a photographer. Memory and the-photograph-as-memory are obviously related to this discussion. Do you find you remember moments from your life better with or without a photograph?

I’m sure there’s a long-term affect from living with a photograph year after year that impresses that picture into one’s memory in a profound way.  The images I “fix” into text are definitely remembered with a similar seriousness.  Between photographs and unphotographables, time will tell which I’ll forget first!

What role do you think photographs play in the construction of our individual memories? Are they false memories?

I don’t think they’re false at all. I don’t know if they’re true, either; the stance on that is up to the maker. They’re a certain something — a something with certainty, even if it’s a bit of a fiction. My unphotographables are decidedly real and true to me, and in no way false — they happened, yes, but it’d be naiive to think there are parts of the frame I may not have described, that were just beyond focus or my field of view.

Your titles / captions are quite detailed and often poetic. Do you think the words you write capture things from those moments that the photograph may have missed? Or are you trying to replace the potential picture with words? How do you view this hypothetical conundrum?

I’m trying to create something out of text that resembles the urgency and import of a photograph. All of us read photographs so quickly. We can see that’s a cow and that’s a wheelbarrow. Text takes more time, so it’s my job to make the text as energized and forward as I can in order to replicate the experience we all have viewing photographs. I’m trying to hook the reader as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Do you hope to evoke a hypothetical photograph in the ‘viewer’s’ mind or is it important to you that the image is removed entirely?

I don’t mind if the viewer sees a one-inch border on the picture and if it’s printed on fiber paper, or if it’s black-and-white or in color. I’m trafficking images, but I can’t control them after their issued — if someone sees the “picture I did not take” as a painting, or as something in three dimensions, that’s their experience, and it’s alright with me. There’s only so much I can lasso.

Most would agree that images are polysemous – i.e. they have layered meanings and multiple interpretations. When viewing images we are filtering all the information at the same time, rather than in a traditional language (or written word) where we are given information in stages, allowing us to develop an understanding as it unfolds. Do you feel your work loses something of this polysemy by omitting the image or is this the whole point?

Unphotographables are akin to watching an image form itself on paper in a bath of developer in the darkroom. They come into the clear, a word at a time. Omitting the image may not be the whole point, but it’s a necessary part of the effort, yes.

The presentation of the work seems to vary, I have seen small black text on white documents as well as larger, coloured poster style reproductions. What is the thinking behind this variable approach and how do you think they affect the readings?

The latest installation of the work is (in part) a collaboration with The Entente, a Brighton-based design firm. For years, I’d been wanting to collaborate with a great designer to see how they could shape the text in a way that might make it come alive in new and unexpected ways. The collaboration has been a great success, and I’ve incorporated it with smaller, handwritten pieces in a group exhibition called Shadow Puppets, currently on view at Georgia State University.

As a practitioner as well as writer, how does this work fit within your repertoire?

Schooled as a writer and self-schooled as a photographer, Unphotographable is the hybrid that joins the two. If everything goes according to plan, a book of the work will be published by the end of the year. It’s an ongoing, never-ending project, but it will feel satisfying to see it in yet-another-form, between two covers.

 

Mitra Tabrizian Interview

From the series Leicestershire, 2012 by Mitra Tabrizian.

Mitra Tabrizian is an Iranian born photographer based in London.  Her work has been exhibited and published widely in international museums and galleries including the V&A and a recent solo exhibition at Tate Britain in 2008.  She is also a Professor of Photography at University of Westminster where I was fortunate enough to have her as a tutor.

Mitra’s photographs cover big topics.  Corporate culture, displacement, and loneliness are a few of the themes that are raised in her work.  He most recent series Leicestershire looks at unemployment and the impact of financial collapse, like factories being shut down, while Lost Time is focused on individual stories of people caught up in the economic struggle.

Considering Mitra’s ability to discuss and engage with complex issues and theoretical frameworks (as seen in her writing) her practical work is not one to suffer from ‘over-thinking’.  Quite the opposite.  Somehow the ideas embed themselves in an eloquent and visually elegant manner, making the work often more accessible than the theory behind it.  This, for me, is photography at it’s best.  Not shirking the theory off as esoteric and pretentious, as some might and do, but understanding it and putting it to good use.  She manages to do this whilst retaining that photographer’s instinct; creating a space to transform the ideas into a visual language, and in doing so, communicating to our senses in a powerful way.

You may be able to catch the end of her exhibition Another Country at The Wapping Project Bankside if you hurry.  Failing that, she published the book Another Country this year which assembles her most recent works, available here and published by Hatje Cantz.

Sharon Boothroyd: Your work incorporates elements of fictional narrative (to a greater or lesser degree) to portray hugely real and universal themes such as the lure of capitalism, estrangement, exile and displacement.  What is gained by using fiction to discuss these big themes?

Mitra Tabrizian: This is a big and complex question, a short answer would be, at one level, (some of) my work could be read as an ongoing commentary on corporate culture and where it is taking us.  I don’t think you could really ‘discuss’ these big themes within an art /photographic context.   So the work is more of an allusion to aspects of what we might call the ‘crisis of contemporary culture’, from a critical perspective.

If you mean ‘Why use ‘fiction’ rather than ‘documentary’, if I understood your question correctly?  Brecht’s critique of traditional approach to ‘documentary’ photography may still be useful here. Brecht proffered the way forward in a quotation that both questions the assumed transparency of the photograph to what it represents whilst suggesting the more radical potential of the medium. ‘Less than at any other time, he said, ‘does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality…. Therefore something has actually to be constructed, something artificial, something set up.’

In short, I have always been interested in ‘documentary’ photography, even though at times I produced  ‘stylised’ or constructed images. According to film theorist Paul Rotha, ‘Documentary defines not subject or style but approach. It justifies the use of every known technical artifice to gain its effect on the spectator.’

What enhancement does using real people enacting their stories (like in Lost Time) bring to the work as opposed to hiring professional actors?

In the past, I sometimes used actors or non actors/ friends  to stand in for the subject in a particular scenario, as the main ethos then (following yet again Brecht’s ideas) was, you don’t necessarily have to use the real workers, for instance, to say something about working condition in a factory.  I now think its important for the actual people to participate; to ‘play’ themselves in the image which, in one way or another, reflects  their lives. As something else happens in that process of reconstruction!

For instance, I produced the series ‘Lost Time’ in 2002 when the companies ‘restructuring’ plan forced many to take an early retirement. Focusing on business men and women in their 40’s & 50’s, the project addressed the concept of ageism by portraying the individual’s sense of (premature) inactivity, unwantedness and ultimately ‘failure’ in a society where, more than ever, the young are fetishised.

From the series Lost Time by Mitra Tabrizian.

Amongst the participants was a BBC producer in his 50s who was asked to reapply for his job, which was producing a program that he had created himself! He was gutted and resigned. After hearing the story, I had this image of a man in a suit, curled up on the floor.  But I felt very uncomfortable asking him to do this, when eventually it came up in the conversation, he really liked the idea.  ‘You hit the nail on the head!’ he said.  For me, this is the most powerful image in the series,  mainly because  its a more ‘genuine’ , if you like, portrayal of pain and disappointment at the most private  moment, of someone who has gone through a particular experience.

As a practitioner of both the moving image and still photography can you briefly mention what you consider to be the benefits of each medium and how they complement each other? 

I see photography and film as two separate entities. And I’m referring to narrative films here and Not video arts.  Especially when it comes to making a film as you need to employ a different strategy of working altogether.  I have made three short films.  All are narrative based and you realize how difficult it is to tell a story successfully.  And that’s a big challenge, as you have to be able to see the bigger picture from the outset, at least for me (as different directors work differently), whereas in photography you can afford to experiment more (i.e. you don’t necessarily have to plan it all in advance).

What hopes and fears do you have for the future of photography?

Victor Burgin, in a recent interview entitled ‘Art and politics: A reappraisal’ expressed concern about the ‘mediatization of the art’:

I see the critical task of art today as that of offering an alternative to the media. I am opposed to any form of conformity to the contents and codes of the doxa … even when these are deployed with a ‘Left’ agenda, as I believe that in this particular case  ‘one cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools’.

Victor Burgin

So Burgin warns us against what he calls the ‘progressive colonization of the terrain of languages, beliefs and values by mainstream media contents and forms -imposing an industrial uniformity upon what may be imagined and said’ and the art world is no exception to this process.

So ‘conformity’ is something we may fear, as for the ‘hope’, I have no idea!

What piece of advice would you pass on to younger artists?

Take risks.

Deadly Affair, from the series Border by Mitra Tabrizian.

Rena Effendi Interview

From the series Chernobyl: Still Life in the Zone, by Rena Effendi.

The nuclear accident of Chernobyl occurred in 1986.  Although most of the 30km area remains restricted, about 230 people still live there in what was, and to some extent still is, a devastation.  This area is known as The Zone of Alienation.  Most of the inhabitants are elderly women who have lived a lifetime witnessing horror, including Nazi occupation and The Great Famine during Stalin’s rule.  However this is their home and that is where they choose to remain.

No matter how damaged the land is and how harsh the experience, they still call it and make it home.

Excerpt from Institute for Artist Management.

Rena Effendi visited these inhabitants and witnessed their lives for us.  As in all her work, the human essence of survival and the fragility of life are interwoven in a narrative that is as engrossing as it is empowering.

Recently shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Photography prize for sustainability, currently on show at the Saatchi Gallery, Rena Effendi is showing her true colours to a wider audience.  Though she is not new to prestigious awards having won the Prince Claus Fund Award for Culture and Development in 2011, National Geographic  ’All Roads’ award in 2008 and Getty Images Editorial Grant in 2006. Effendi has exhibited worldwide and is a key figure in documentary photography.

SB: Gender, identity, vulnerable people and those at risk are prominent subjects of your work yet dealt with in a very empathetic manner.  What is it about these nuanced issues of humanity that interests you, as well perhaps as the more obvious photojournalistic themes of war and conflict?

RE: I think that when the work is socially engaged, it becomes more compelling and therefore lives longer in the minds of the people, makes a stronger impact. I am fascinated with the human power of survival, our adaptability and our will to persevere in spite of difficult conditions and challenges that life puts in front of us. The prevalence of human spirit over any hardship brought about by war, natural disaster, nuclear catastrophe, social discrimination, rejection or loss is the major theme of my work.

Your work seems to portray tenderly the clash between delicacy and brutality. Do you think being a woman has influenced how you take pictures? 

I think that the world we live in is very fragile and this fragility makes each individual experience unpredictable. When things are going well I can’t stop thinking — but what if it’s only now and what happens next? Sometimes I think that I am in full control, but it’s only an illusion. It’s like I am walking on this very thin thread, swaying left and right, trying to balance. I think that acknowledging the fact that you are not in control is very humbling both for men and for women. Some people call it “finding God”. For me, it’s simply a fact of life. All I can do is make the best possible effort to retain my humanity. I have found that what interests me most is these tender human moments in the face of disaster or brutal life experience.  I am not the only one referencing it in my work – humanity is almost every one’s subject.

What makes you decide to pursue a project?

A theme that intrigues me, consumes me, gives me a feeling of restlessness, it has to be something that literally kicks me out of the house. Self-motivation is a difficult exercise for everyone, this is why it’s important to be truly interested in the project you are embarking on, this is why they call them – “personal”, as the work has to resonate with you first of all and then with others.

How much research do you do before you go on assignment?  How do the aspects of research and responding to the situation you are in complement together?

Each story is different, but usually it is a little bit of both. For some stories it’s necessary to do research beforehand. However, I very much like to keep it fresh and open. Sometimes it’s good to go in without any knowledge whatsoever, almost blind-folded, because then when you open your eyes the scene is more vivid. I rely a lot on intuition and serendipity. Coming in with this ‘virgin’ perspective helps you to be sensitive and have a more nuanced view of the place, notice details that you could omit or render unimportant if you overdo on your research. Not knowing also gives you a sense of courage, you dare to do more, go further, you are willing to experiment, whereas when you read and see too much about the place before you go in, you impose the invisible barriers of knowledge that may stop you from exploring the story from a fresh angle.

How do you think women can make the best of a career as a photographer if they also want to have a family and might need to stay at home more?

Tough question. It’s hard work. It’s been very difficult for me to balance my professional life with family. I am blessed with a very supportive family, but being away from my daughter as she grows up is extremely difficult. I just hope that she will understand one day that her mom has a very cool job.

What is it about your job that you love most?

Aside from the act of taking pictures, my favorite part is to look over the results and build a visual narrative. I get excited when I see good photographs and relive the moments from the story. These moments stay with me forever, they enrich my life.

Dana Popa Interview

By Dana Popa from the series not Natasha.

Dana Popa did  brave thing.  She took her talent for photography and used it to expose an illegal trade, a predominantly hidden industry which depends on selling women for profit.  Now an Internationally recognised problem, sex trafficking is often compared to the slave trade in it’s vulgarity and severity and yet there is still a lot to be done to alleviate the problem and get to the point of convicting these criminals and protecting women worldwide.  I was interested in Dana’s experience in meeting these survivors and also her thoughts on the difference she believes photography can make to situations like these.

Dana Popa is a Romanian photographer based in London.   Her series not Natasha has received International acclaim, including Amnesty International, Foto8, FOAM, BJP and Portfolio magazine.

The book Not Natasha was published by Autograph ABP in 2009.  Presented like a notebook or journal of these women’s experiences it creates a personal interaction with the subject matter and the reader in a poignant and hard hitting manner.

SB: What brought you to the point of doing a series on women who have been trafficked?  

DP: What triggered my work was purely finding out what sex trafficking really means. At the time there was not much visual coverage of the illegal trade. Sex trafficking is the most profitable illegal business since the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union; it’s a form of violence against women from my society. Little do people realise what this illegal trade is and how big and profitable it has become. So I decided to try and get a closer look at sex trafficking and record what it means for the women to survive sexual slavery. I chose to have a glimpse of their souls – which at the time seemed very difficult to do, but that is what I was most interested in. After having heard their stories, I wanted to look at their traces – at what women who had disappeared for years and who are believed to be trafficked and sexually enslaved leave behind. This became essential angle and part of the narrative. After being involved with this project I realised that it’s beginnings might have been triggered by my interest and knowledge of the woman’s position in societies like the one I was born in. I acknowledge this story as a way of standing up against the societies that know what happens to their women and hide it without even doing anything about it.

Did you find it difficult to get access and how did you navigate this?

Getting access was the hardest aspect and most frustrating part all along the years I made this work. I worked a lot to establish all sorts of connections with NGOs fighting sex trafficking in different countries. I received less than half of the help I needed to make the story. The rest I had to do myself, which was difficult and took a long time. During the first year I worked with two local NGOs in Moldova, IOM Moldova and Winrock International. Later on, I worked with the Police in London and I also went on my own into Turkey. The women accepted me in their lives, some for three weeks, some only for a few hours, depending on where I would meet them. I had to be both discreet and protective, respectful to their wishes, and always asking for their consent. It was not hard to explain the reasons of my work. The social workers allowed me to visit some of the women who survived trafficking and were now living back in their homes, or wherever they returned to. The most pleasant part of the learning process was when I spent time at one of the shelters that offered them psychological assistance and accommodation for a month or so. I had spent 2 weeks with girls that had just escaped sexual slavery. They were spinning stories about their ordeals every evening. This is what actually helped me frame the story and urged me to continue it at a later stage. 

What impact did the project have on you as a woman / person?

I am not sure it had such a strong impact on me as a woman/person on a long term.  It rather opened my eyes on the type of issues I feel it is important to make work on. It became clear my interests lie within subjects concerning women and human rights. Whilst making the project, the girls’ confessions about the torture they went through brought me so close to their ordeal and shocked me at the beginning. Their words stayed with me, and they are very much important part of the book I made. It’s their voice, and brining their voice close to the audience matters to me.

Your background in photojournalism seems paramount in training you to face tough situations and difficult scenarios, what was the best advice you received and held onto for this series? 

I don’t think I received an advice regarding this series as I did not tell anyone I was working on it until I started editing it. In general one of the best pieces of advice that I had received in re to portraying survivors was to approach them with respect, to firstly see and show their humanity and dignity through my photography. Also, to have patience, something that I needed a lot in this long term and slow making project.

Although the series is journalistic in style (real life events, personal stories, raising awareness etc) it also covers a fine art approach in the style of images (with a blend of subtle imagery such as a covered pram, juxtaposed with writing and shown alongside more narrative pieces).  I sense that photographic genres are overlapping more than ever.  Bearing this in mind, how did you view the final edit?  What were your aims in putting this work together?  

I usually work in a very intuitive way and the pictures and editing are not a result of a deep introspection. This work was no exception. Of course I have a photojournalistic background which probably shapes my style but on the other hand what I really want to capture in a picture is not what’s directly visible in it. So I think that’s why you can see the work has an artistic approach. At the time I was definitely not aware of any overlapping trend, even though I agree that it is quite obvious these days.

How do you feel art-based photography and photo-journalism can best compliment each other?

I think there has been beautifully complex (in the way you are suggesting) photography since the its very beginning. I feel tempted to say that perhaps now there is that type of analysis but the overlapping has always been there. Like I was saying, I never realised I could be an example of such; I just photograph. To me photography is not only about capturing a fragment of visible reality. One could even say that that is actually impossible and in a frame there are always several dimensions of a reality, even in studio photography.

What impact do you think photography can have in helping actual change happen for people such as these?

Actual change… It’s a bit late to talk about change in the case of the ones who had been sold into sexual slavery(except if you consider that the images helped raised funds for the NGO to continue offering them support). But on the other hand being involved in a project like this can be used as therapy for the survivors and I hope it was a positive thing for the girls I photographed. Of course the impact photography can have is significant, in making us all shocked by the reality that’s happening much closer to what we might think. But it would be more effective if for instance police had real funds to tackle the issue and the reality is that lots of those funds have been in the recent years cut down.

What change has ‘Not Natasha’ made to the best of your knowledge?  

Well, it has raised awareness in a fantastic way worldwide and it raised funds to go to the NGOs who work with the survivors as well as to prevent other people being trafficked. I was investigating a hidden reality: the underground world of trafficking with the severe implications it has on the survivors of sexual slavery; only the fact we now talk about it and the audience can be aware of this reality is a huge step in the direction of the change we all want to happen.

What did the girls think of the final product and are you still in touch?

I am still in touch with a few of the women I met in this journey and in more often contact with a couple of them. As a reaction, they were interested to see my work. One of them decided to help me continue my visual work on sex trafficking as much as she could and another one looked on the book dummy with curiosity since she had been very much part of the project both as a survivor and a great help in translating and making the liasion with other girls at the shelter. When she reached the end of the book, she closed it and said: “Ok, from now on, we won’t be talking about this anymore.” We still keep in touch.

Edgar Martins Interview

Edgar Martins from the series This is Not a House.  

www.edgarmartins.com

Edgar Martins creates photographs which tend to find themselves immersed in political and social debates of the time.  He is consistently engaged with the zeitgeist and his work reflects a critical analysis of our society and current affairs, whether it be our modern obsession with improvements or financial collapse.

In 2008 Edgar’s work caused controversy in the US after he digitally re-shaped a select few images from his series This is Not a House, a commission for the New York Times Magazine, exploring the collapse of the housing market. Martins photographed abandoned golf courses, homes, hotels, ski resorts in 16 separate locations over 6 American States.  This is Not a House is currently touring Europe and the USA with stops scheduled this year at the Rome International Photography Festival (MACRO, September); The Gallery of Photography, Dublin (March-May 2013) & Ffotogallery, Wales (May-June 2013).

What was a riveting polemic about deception and misrepresentation for some, was to others the re-surfacing of a tiresome age-old ontological, epistemological and moral chasm between Art and Journalism.

Edgar Martins

In it’s scale and ambition This is Not a House reminds me of the important work conducted by the FSA in America during the Depression.  Photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Langue and Gordon Parks were commissioned to look at the living conditions of rural America in an era of financial disaster. The aim of images like Dorothea Langue’s Migrant Mother, was to introduce Americans to Americans.  Seen in the national papers the images informed the nation about the effects of the Depression, particularly on the farming community and forced the public to ‘witness’ the extent of the poverty.

These photographers were commissioned with a particular agenda and were asked to find specific images to fit a brief.  We seemingly have no reason to wonder if they were accurate representations and not assumptions or bias because they were unaltered photographs.  But photography itself is misleading. It does of course portray what it saw in front of the lens, but this does not make it a factual account of the general state of affairs.

All these years later the term ‘objective truth’ is dubious and with digital resources being so proficient, the question of accuracy is heightened.  Of course it is important to have boundaries for journalistic purposes, but instead of revisiting old arguments by dissecting the accuracy of a building, we would benefit by asking ourselves the greater questions the series raises, like “what is happening to our society and what is to be done?”

The lesson learnt is for the commissioning body to determine if they are asking a photographer to document an issue or asking an artist to interpret it. Here it seems they got both.

Originally from Portugal, Edgar Martins moved to the UK in 1996 and soon completed an MA in Photography and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. His work has been awarded numerous awards and received international recognition in being shown at MoMA, nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2009 and chosen to represent Macau at the 54th Venice Biennale.  Born in 1977, Edgar already has 9 books to his name.  He currently lives in London where he continues to consider the impact of modernity on society and uses photography to challenge our acceptance of what is real.

SB: Your use of colour is striking.  Are you conscious of colour techniques when you are choosing subjects and composition or is it an intuitive process for you?  

EM: In 2002, in the last year of my MA at the Royal College of Art, I helped to found a publishing house called The Moth House. I came up with this name, which I think is representative of the relationship I have with photography.

I am of course drawn to light and color and in this sense much of this process is inherently intuitive to me. But I use light and color as means of enhancing the dialectical possibilities of the photographic image as something that fluctuates between the factual and fictional, between the real and the metaphorical.

Although your images are aesthetically and visually beautiful you are very grounded in photographic theory and your concepts are dense and thought provoking.  How did you develop this ‘best of both worlds’ approach?

My visual approach to photography is more methodology than aesthetics. The frontal, rectilinear planes, straight perspectives and neutral viewpoint give the viewer a false sense of security. It helps to create the illusion of photographic transparency/objectivity.

My images depend on photography’s inherit tendency to make each space believable, but there is a disturbing suggestion that all is not what it seems. This process of slow revelation and sense of temporal manipulation is crucial to the work. I use the ‘framework’ and the language of photography to talk about the process of thinking about and creating images. Photography, for me, is a medium built around conceptual tensions and so it offers me a means to bring together irresolvable contradictions.

Your work has certain scientific aspects in its topographical approach and in isolating elements like artifacts. Yet you are questioning the certainty of such claims by showing them to be temporal and in flux.  How important is it to you to question what is generally perceived to be ‘true’ and how does photography suit this?

In my images I am forever denying the thing that I am representing, forever alluding to a world beyond this. The challenge lies in overriding photography’s inherent documentary function in order to connect the image to a world, narrative or pictorial culture beyond the referent. And that is where other disciplines and references come into play: whether it be painting, sculpture, physics, science, etc.

And fiction, as Jacques Rancière argues, is elementary to understanding the real. Bernardo Soares (one of Fernando Pessoa’s many pseudonyms) wrote: “some truths cannot be told except as fiction”. Perhaps it may also be the case that some truths are better told as fiction.

Edgar Martins

I like your description of the moral chasm between art and journalism and the point that perhaps some truths are better told as fiction.  Do you see the art vs documentary divide as being defunct in today’s photography? 

Journalistic ethics aside, Art and Journalism have been using the same methods for artistic expression for many years, so I don’t think there is a chasm as such. What I have tried to highlight and question with projects such as This is not a House is how often social/politically-oriented issues are conceptualised and understood outside the scope of the canonical photo-documentary. Photojournalism has never felt the need to challenge or contravene certain rules, aesthetic or ethical. Yet, within this framework there is a perpetual search, not to mention a real need, to find new ways of assimilating and representing the real.

So I viewed this project, from the outset, as a platform to explore new models for rethinking and tackling a particular subject-matter. As I recently mentioned in an interview to Aesthetica magazine I am of the belief that photojournalism’s prevailing framework promotes unattainable expectations and contributes to a culture of passive consumers who use and view images carelessly and gratuitously. This does a disservice to the public and Journalism itself.

I am not saying that there isn’t good reportage out there. I am sure there is. Its just that the newspaper format, with all its pressures, deadlines, rigid operating culture and the constraints that normally arise from commercial/political associations is increasingly an inadequate vehicle for the dissemination of thought-provoking documentary photography. Photography is a medium that should help us to reflect on our place in the world as well as on the place of the photographic.

What is your best advice for artists in difficult economic times? How would you advise artists to continue making work as well as paying the bills as it is becomes harder to rely on print sales?  

I harnessed the fund-raising skills from a young age. This is how I managed to publish my first book at the tender age of 18 and also how I put together my first exhibition. Prior to coming to England in 96, I decided to take a full year off my studies in order to work and save funds to study Photography.  I thought this would keep me going for at least another year. Well, let’s just say the money didn’t go as far as I had imagined it would.

So I was faced with a stark dilemma: how to continue studying, producing work and living? I used the fund-raising skills I developed when I lived in China, went to a local library and borrowed a book with the names and addresses of every single cultural organisation in Europe. I wrote the same letter to each organisation. I must have sent around 200 letters. Most didn’t reply, I got quite a few rejections, but one or two were very helpful. That is partly how I got myself through college and university. And since then bursaries & grants have been instrumental to my practice.

So I think artists have to have their wits about them, have to be industrious, take initiative and not be phased by rejection. Most of the work I develop is still self-structured and ‘personal’. This often requires months of preparatory and research work, letters, proposals, fundraising, etc. This way of working is not for everyone, I get that, but all of this gets easier with time and a world of opportunities soon opens up.

Installation view of This is Not a House at The Wapping Project by Edgar Martins.

Find Edgar on Facebook here.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Interview

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.  From the Series People in Trouble laughing Pushed to the Ground (Dots).  www.choppedliver.info

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are familiar names in photographic art. They have been working together for 15 years and have seen their work displayed in some of the most important photography centres and collections in the world, including Tate Modern, V&A, International Centre of Photography, Musee de l’Elysee and The Saatchi Gallery, where they were recently part of Out of Focus.  It was here that I encountered People in Trouble for the first time in the flesh.

People in Trouble laughing Pushed to the Ground is Adam and Oliver’s response to a commission to spend time with and interpret the photographic archives of Belfast Exposed.  Belfast Exposed Photography was founded as a community photography initiative in 1983 and holds an archive consisting of over 14,000 contact sheets taken in Northern Ireland during the The Troubles.  The divide between Nationalists and Unionists being at it’s worst in the 1970′s and 80′s when political stances were tense and Northern Ireland was perceived as being an unsafe place, war torn.

These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains.

It was of particular interest to me being from Northern Ireland.  I spent my teenage days in (what was then) a back street darkroom which has since become one of the fore-leading centres of photography in Ireland.  The photographs that make up the archive Oliver and Adam were working with were haphazardly tacked up around the place; crumpled black & white prints of paramilitary funerals, family feuds and community conflicts, some unfixed and torn, falling off the walls.  It fascinated me, and these images, and the photographers who took them (Mervyn Smyth, Sean McKernan, Seamus Loughran and Gerry Casey), were such a major part of my early photographic development.  It was with surprise and nostalgia that I was looking at them altered and defamiliarised, behind glass, isolated in white and presented in the setting of such a major International gallery.

I see this as a new categorisation of a destructive past, one which can be revisited and made into something edifying, productive and interesting.  It is by facing these images and defamiliarising ourselves from them, like distancing ourselves from a bad memory, that we are enabled to move on and see the past in a new light, one cleansed of it’s hatred.

Adam and Oliver are from South Africa, so have been saved the historical ties with the original work that I had.  I was interested to see how they approached the archive and they kindly agreed to an interview.

SB: What struck you most when you first saw the Belfast Exposed archive i.e. the original images?

AB & OC:  It’s hard not to be moved by this extraordinary collection.

“Interrogating the document” is one phrase that has been used to describe your approach to the archive.  Would you agree?

It’s interesting to think about what it means to use an archive. And of course what is the correct use.  What is expected of an artistic response to an archive, as opposed to say the response of a historian, academic, journalist, freedom fighter? The idea of the artist working with the archive has become so common place. You could almost say it was a legitimate genre of art practice. So we were weary of that. In the end our response was rather mechanical, and grew out of a physical engagement with the contact sheets and the hundreds of files of negatives.  People In Trouble laughing Pushed to the Ground came out of all that. But I am still not sure it is a legitimate or even useful response to the archive.

What do you think is the most important difference between the original work (contextualised as a document) and your reworking of it, which is presented and described as art?

The answer to that depends very much on your relationship to the images I believe. Even within the Belfast exposed organisation there were conflicting views on this. For some of the photographers, who had spent 20 years risking their lives to produce these images through a period of political and violent struggle, it was hard to see a difference. For others, say the amateurs (perhaps the concept of an amateur photographers is already defunct?) but anyway the non- professional contributors, the difference was stark. These anonymous images, retrieved from a dark box in a small dark room, taken fleetingly almost unconsciously, we’re now transformed in scale, in physical context, but also in conceptual context, in which the image resonates not just within a historical period in northern Ireland, but the history of conceptual photography. Sean O’Hagen reviewing this work for the Guardian described our approach as ‘conceptual pranksterism’ which might have been a little passive aggressive, although I could easily be being over sensitive! But his attitude does indicate how contentious the use of the archive is, and the conflicting feelings that co-exist about the difference between the photographic document and the photograph as art object.

It is such a vast archive, how did you begin to make sense of it all and interpret what you were faced with?    

We first encountered the Belfast Exposed archive with very little background knowledge. I do think this vacuum – a lack of personal connection to the material and only a broad understanding about the history of the Troubles – was instrumental in the work we ended up producing. We came to the material with a kind of cultural and historical blankness. If this has been an archive in South Africa say, dealing with the anti-apartheid struggle, we’d have engaged the material in a completely different way, with a more personal agenda perhaps. But in this vacuum our focus drifted towards more mechanical and formalistic concerns.

We turned the archive on its side, looking at what was above and below the surface of the images. So in this sense we used the archive in the same way that an archeologist ‘uses’ a burial site. To uncover new connections. And to connect disparate fragments.

About the Dots:

Whenever an image in this archive was chosen, approved or selected, a blue, red or yellow dot was placed on the surface of the contact sheet as a marker. The position of the dots provided us with a code; a set of instructions for how to frame the photographs. Each of the circular photographs reveals the area beneath these circular stickers; the part of each image that has been obscured from view the moment it was selected. Each of these fragments – composed by the random gesture of the archivist – offers up a self-contained universe all of its own; a small moment of desire or frustration or thwarted communication that is re-animated here after many years in darkness.

Some of the discoveries from underneath the dots are jarring, emotive, unnerving and poignant.  What was your reaction when you saw the isolated ‘dots’ exposed for the first time?  Was it a Eureka moment?

We’ve often described the process of printing these dots and leaving out to dry on the floor of the Belfast Exposed offices. One of the early founders of the archive, Mervyn Smyth, was perturbed. These are images with which he is very familiar, and at times the small circles detail instantly reminded him of the bigger picture. But there were other details that he could not be sure of. We’d watch his mind race through his internal catalogue trying to match this foot or that mouth or the corner piece of a pavement to a recognisable photograph. And he found it disconcerting that sometimes it was impossible to quite know for sure. So perhaps you could describe that as the opposite of a eureka moment. What would you call that? A moment in which you are struck suddenly by the murkiness of history and memory.

The final edit also includes every day imagery.  As you put it, pictures of “drinking tea, kissing girls“.  For the final edit of Dots, what were your main editing considerations? You could have gone for a totally random selection or chosen particularly emotive images or ones you deemed most powerful.  How did you establish what you wanted the work to convey?

The selection was made as the mages were made, in a mechanical way. We titled each image descriptively, as you mention Girl Kissing, Boy Falling etc… And then grouped the types of actions. Or the types of subjects. Essentially worked with the titles, independently of the images, to create a poetic form. And that extended poem determined the selection, the order and I suppose it conveys a specific mood too. I once read a part of this poem during an interview on Ulster Radio but I think it got canned.

Here it is…

People in trouble laughing pushed to the ground. Soldiers leaning, pointing, reaching. Woman sweeping. Balloons escaping. Coffin descending. Boys standing. Grieving. Chair balancing. Children smoking. Embracing. Creatures barking. Cars burning. Helicopters hovering. Faces. Human figures. Shapes. Birds. Structures left standing and falling…

Finally, you always seem to work as a collaborative.  What brought you together, how do you make decisions and what different aspects do each of you bring to the process?

We’ve been asked this one before….. and if you look at some past interviews you’ll probably find a history of conflicting answers to this same question. The surprising and wonderful thing is that it somehow endures beyond all expectation.

This interview includes excerpts from an interview previously published in Source.

Jamie House Interview

From the series Strangers by Jamie House.  

I have access to people’s memories, vacations and celebrations which I record in one single-image; a portrait of someone I do not know.  The resulting images are layers of images and time within someone’s life. This project investigates how we disseminate and share images in the public domain and makes us consider issues of representation and privacy.

Jamie House

Jamie House works with social networking sites, taking people’s personal photographs and turning them into art.  If you care to distinguish between the two.  The images vary between being reminiscent of abstract paintings and sketchily detailed aspects of life.  I am personally drawn to the former approach; the distinguishing parts of someones life merging and fading into obscurity somehow summarises the online world for me.

I asked Jamie to make me a personal montage (see below) and was amused by the results.  I was searching through the condensed mini-archive trying to locate parts of myself, my history and the key moments I deemed important enough to share with the online world yet found hard to make sense of here. Unfortunately I was disappointingly detailed, I clearly need to add more images to my albums to blend me into abstraction and help make better art. Nevertheless, Strangers raises timely questions whist also making visually interesting work, which is one definition of art, for those who need one.

Jamie is a practicing photographic artist and has been involved in photography education for the past 8 years.  His work has been seen in the Aperture project What matters now?, Brighton Photofringe and Hotshoe Gallery as well as being part of international art fairs and solo shows.  He is currently the artist-in-residence at Karst, a contemporary arts space in Plymouth.

SB: What captures you about photography?

JH: It`s a medium that is constantly evolving and changing, photography being a product of technology since its inception with Talbot and Daguerre at the forefront constantly experimenting with this medium. Fast forward to 2012 and photography is a very different animal and still very much a product of technology and our time. I am very interested in the way technology, digital imaging and the digitization of photography has fundamentally changed our visual culture, and changed the way we think about what a photo is.

The digitalization of the medium has changed how we store, view and access images online.  The idea of the “networked Image” an image being an algorithmic piece of data that can have its own life online fascinates me, and how the “average” young person views hundreds of images a day also changes the way we “read” and process images in a non linear way.

However aside from the digital image, I still take great pleasure in submerging myself under the red safe light in the darkroom and experiencing the latent image appear in the developer in front of my eyes. The alchemical process of developing a black and white image still excites me after 13 years of being a practising artist.

Who are your influences?

-Leonard Kleinrock for creating the initial idea of the internet after he published his first paper entitled “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”.

-J.C.R. Licklider for sharing his vision of a galactic network.

-Robert Taylor for helping to create the idea of the network.

-Mark Zuckerberg for creating Facebook.

-Artists Micheal Wolf and Jon Rafman for questioning the very nature of photography and experimenting with Google street view, capturing the sublime beauty and absurdity of everyday life and highlighting questions surrounding the surveillance of public spaces.

-John Balderssari for using photography as a art form especially his early photography series “Wrong”.  In this early and important example of conceptual  art (with humour!) , Baldessari puts himself in the role of the amateur photographer. An   unwritten rule known to every amateur photographer is not to photograph a person standing in front of a tree, especially not a tree that appears to be growing out of the subject’s head. For this work Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head, this and other work really challenged the canons of photography in the sixties.

Can you talk us through the technical process of ‘Strangers’?

I have for the last several years’ stolen images of other people’s memories that I have mined from the internet on various social media sites (mainly Facebook). These people have befriended me online but are not people I have met in person.

Each image is produced by a long exposure focused on a computer screen while browsing a stranger’s social media images. The resulting images are layers of images and time within someone’s life.

Some images are more painterly and abstract; others are more figurative showing images of people with clearly defined profiles. The final aesthetic of the image is controlled by how many images the person has in their Facebook album, if they have one hundred images the final work  is abstracted if they have ten images details of the person, their friends and personal possessions are recorded in more defined detail.

I use my skills as a photographer to frame and compose the computer screen and isolate details. For me these images and the process I use creates a new visual language if I zoom into the screen a grid of colour and the structure of the screen pixels become apparent. The individual size of peoples images within people browsers, the arrows that advance Facebook images, even the mouse cursor can and do become part of the work, these indicators of how the users navigates images are very interesting to me and hopefully make people question how we process and interpret images differently with the advent of digital images.

How did you have the idea and how did it evolve into what it is now?  (i.e. talk us through your thought process.)

I am naturally quite a nosey and inquisitive person, and this was a way I could vicariously live through other people lives through images they took and get under the skin of what it’s like to be alive today. I began to realise by using Facebook, that I have this vast archive of images from friends I know only virtually from across the globe, a giant melting of cultures and backgrounds. I am very interested by the meaning and interpretations of images I don’t know the answers to, I enjoy trying to imagine the intentions of the stranger’s gaze who originally took the images I am re-photographing.

The photographs on somebody’s Facebook photo albums are usually really poignant in terms of the absence of the photographer taking the image, and how people’s subconscious vision informs what they are taking pictures of. However unlike a traditional analogue family album which was usually taken by one main family member, a Facebook picture album with the technology of geotagging enables multiples photographers to share their images of that person in one album so you have this very diverse and multi faceted view of someone you don’t know.

How do you feel about using other people’s images to create your own, albeit very different, image?  Has anyone ever questioned it in terms of copyright?  

I am totally comfortable in using other people’s images especially on social media platforms such as Facebook where they have signed up to share. People share their most private and intimate details with people they don’t know. In our current age of the “celebrity” we have a voracious appetite for ways to share what we are doing through you tube to the remains of reality TV, people have an increased desire to observe human beings at play. I personally think our rights to privacy are almost entirely non-existent, we live in a world where our every action is almost totally transparent to all.

When I complete my images I usually repost these back on Facebook and it’s very rare that anyone recognises their own images.

I see myself at times adopting the role of the curator, re-organising other peoples images that are representations of their lives, re-photographing and re-contextualising them.  My long exposure technique seems to flatten all these layers of time into one single image.

Do you know if the images, although often abstract, give any sense of the subject’s personhood (or at least how they are portrayed online)?  E.g., chaotic, bright and vibrant, calm, serene etc?  

This is a very interesting question and a hard one to answer. I am not sure if the images I produce respond to emotions like chaotic or serene, however maybe the amount of images people have respond to how they define themselves by how they are seen by others, validating their actions and sense of self to the world.

As a photography educator – do you think art can be taught or is it a natural way of seeing and interpreting the world?

I am not sure if art can be taught or not, some people have a natural intuitive approach to image making where they almost immediately understand how to sequence images, colour relationships, metaphor and formal considerations of line, tone and perspective. I believe we are all born creative and as children undertake a lot of creative play and as we “progress” through the schooling system become more institutionalized to think and act in certain ways.

I think one thing that can be taught is how to think critically and the ability for one to contextualise and position their work in contemporary practice and acknowledge the role of photographic and art history in one’s own practice. In addition to this I believe artists should and can be taught how to be “visible” and follow etiquette for contacting people in the art world. Finally I think an important thing that can be taught is how to promote yourself, be organised, have systems and have a good sense of business acumen.

To see more of Jamie’s work:

His work is curators choice at Photofringe.

He is currently chapter 11 of The Digital Chain.

jhouse78.wordpress.com

about.me/jamiehouse

pinholeparcelproject.co.uk