Experimenting with Photography

Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of chairing a talk on the theme "experimenting with photography". I organised the talk after I noticed that this seemed to concern quite a few of the members who entered this year's Members exhibition at Photofusion, which I curated. Photographers are making photograms, experimenting with colour and paper in the darkroom, writing on photos, manipulating them digitally to create something else... it is almost as if, with the ubiquity of digital imaging, photographers are striving to create something new and original.

©Chloe Sells

This trend was reflected in the final selection for the exhibition; four out of eleven of the exhibitors are experimenting with the photograph in some way. Jeremy Akerman takes pictures of landscapes or urban scenes, cuts them, and then pastes the pieces back together in a different order. The resulting images are still recognisable as landscapes, but something has happened to them; the act of destroying the surface of the print and then re-creating them adds another dimension to the image. Chloe Sells creates large colour prints in the darkroom, in which she plays with the light with prisms to create blocks of coloured light leaks. She also manipulates the surface of the image by folding the paper while printing, so concealing parts of the photograph.

©Eva Stenram, ©Judith Lyons

Judith Lyons and Eva Stenram use digital techniques in order to create their work, although they have both used analogue processes in previous projects. Lyons uses images of ova, sperm and foetuses to create digitally constructed montages, one for each month of the gestation period. Stenram's image, Drape, is a digitally manipulated vintage pin-up photograph, in which she uses digital technology to lengthen a curtain in the image, so that it drapes over the model and conceals her assets. Last night she also introduced us to new work, in which she finds hard core pornographic images on the internet, and removes the bodies to create the scene as if they were never there.

All photographers seemed to agree that their processes were about questioning the inherent meaning of truth which is linked to photography, and yet their reasoning for this was varied. Judith Lyons challenges the relationship between the image and the subject matter characteristic of photography; the fact that you can't photograph something which is not there. Eva Stenram is interested in the fact that photos can be changed again and again, and that, even if they don't pretend to be real, viewers tend to look twice.

For Jeremy Akerman, his cutting and pasting of photographs is a quest to get back to the physicality of the picture. Quoting Susan Sontag, who back in 1977 mentioned there were too many images in the world, and that was before the advent of digital photography, Akerman pointed out that the photographic surface was dead; most images we see nowadays are on a screen. For him, and for Chloe Sells, it is the surface of the photograph which is interesting.

This theme of experimenting with photography was also being explored at London Art Fair's Photo50 exhibition, curated by Sue Steward. I was excited about seeing this exhibition, entitled The New Alchemists - a reference to the old fashioned, analogue methods of photography - and I was expecting great things. But I was disappointed.

©Noemie Goudal, ©Jeremy Akerman

Many of the photographers I was familiar with; Julie Cockburn, Noemie Goudal, Joy Gregory and Esther Teichmann amoungst others. And maybe it's for this reason that nothing surprised me, nothing wowed me. Even Cockburn's work, which I love but had never seen in "real life" disappointed me. The highlight was Noemie Goudal's image, which certainly does trick the eye and successfully comments on the belief that a photograph is authoritative proof.

This idea of playing with the surface of the image and of creating camera-less images is nothing new; the Surrealists were all over it in the 1920's and artists have working in this way ever since. But there does seem to be more experimentation these days, and if I had the task of curating an exhibition of artists working in this way, there are ones that I would have chosen that are exploring the surface of the image in new ways. Carolle Benitah, for example, with her embroidery over old family pictures. I also think that the digital "alchemists" need to get a look in, too; it's not just about collage, or mixed media, but it's about experimenting with new processes in the way Eva Stenram and Judith Lyons do.

©Carolle Benitah

At the end of the talk the other evening, I asked the panel whether they considered themselves to be artists or photographers. They all said they were artists, which I found interesting. But of course they are; there's no decisive moment in their work, they use photography to create something else. And it got me thinking; could this distinction be as simple as Artists Make, Photographers Take? Or is it a way for photographers to get into the art market, as we all know that photography struggles to sell...

Whichever it is, I'm pleased some people are doing it. The work is challenging, inspiring and refreshing in this world of digital imagery. Get crafting, I say.

Momento Mori

For a while now I've wanted to write about the subject of photography and death, but have struggled to find a context with which to write. The theme has been on my mind for the last month for a number of reasons...

Firstly, I am organisng an exhibition at Photofusion (which opens next week, on 22 September) featuring two photographers whose work is concerned with the death of a parent. When André Penteado's father committed suicide, he picked up his camera and took pictures... of the funeral, of his journey to and from the funeral (which was in Brazil), and then for a year later in the form of a visual diary. Striving to have one last physical contact with his father, André took photographs of himself wearing his father's clothes, eyes closed, pensive, on a stone grey background. He then took pictures of the left over empty hangers.

©Andre Penteado, Dad's Clothes

The other photographer is Joachim Froese, who has made quite a few bodies of work following the death of his mother, and the possessions she left behind. The work he will show at Photofusion is from Archive, a study of what happens to possessions once they have been taken out of context; when his mother's belongings were sent to him in Australia, he found they had no meaning for him anymore. His photographs show precarious stacks of china and books, a comment on the constructions of our own personal memory.

While working closely with these photographers, I have had the pleasure to meet (if only on the phone for now) Sue Steward, a journalist and independent curator who, on the death of her mother in 2009, found an urge to photograph the dead body. In an article she wrote for The Guardian, she describes the sense of guilt she felt as she committed this act, looking round to check no one was looking. But then she found that many other photographers had also had this impulse; most famously Annie Leibowitz photographing her partner Susan Sontag.

©Annie Liebowitz, November 2004, Untitled

All these conversations got me thinking about the link between photography and death, and then it became rather too relevant when I heard that my uncle died. He had been very sick, so it wasn't unexpected, but it doesn't make the sense of loss any less painful for us all. At the funeral, my father asked if I had brought my camera... and, although I had thought about it, I felt that it was inappropriate.

But a couple of days later I had a Roland Barthes moment. At the wake, my cousin told me that he had found many old photographs of our parents when they were children, and he emailed the scans to me shortly after. I felt like Barthes in his Camera Lucida... I was looking at picture of my uncle at a very young age and recognised him completely. This wasn't the sick old man I had last seen on a hospital bed at Christmas time, thin and wizzened, struggling to hear and lethargic with drugs. Here, in the eyes of this 10 year old boy, I saw the man I wanted to remember; the man with an amazing brain and an insatiable curiosity.

My late Uncle Rémi is on the left, my mother in the middle, and their brother Eric on the right. My mother told me she remembers going to get this picture taken, and she was scared as she thought it would hurt. How differently children respond to the camera these days!

At the beginning of this week I came across this film on the Guardian website, and I finally found the context with which to write this post. In the wake of the Japanese tsunami, hundreds of volunteers from the Fujifilm factory are collecting photographs found in the damaged areas, cleaning them, and archiving them in order to "save the memories of a nation". Many of the images have washed off the paper, a reference rather too close to what happened to the people depicted on them, and yet the volunteers still feel it is important to keep the indecipherable images. As one volunteer reads out the caption on the back of a photograph (dated 1954!) he turns it over to find the image completely gone. But we must keep it, he says, as it may help to identify the other pictures in the album.



The cleaned photographs are then organised by where they were found and sent to a centre where people can browse for their memories. As one man says, the people who go there "have lost their homes and their past". Photographs are such an important key to our past.  I was so pleased to see the old photographs of my uncle, which still exist seventy years later, but I can't help wondering whether the children of our children of this digital age will be blessed with such tools as they get older. When, in eighty years time, my friend's daughter passes away, will her children have photographs of her as she is now? Or will they be locked in some digital timewarp, following the fate of floppy disks and the like. For all we know, we may be living in what will become the Dark Ages.

It's time to start printing pictures. As for photographing the dead, or the impulse to photograph what's left behind, it's a theme that occupies many photographers, and has inspired a book by Audrey Linkman. For my part, I am looking forward to hearing Sue Steward in conversation with André and Joachim at Photofusion on 11 October; I think it will be an interesting discussion, if perhaps not a very up-beat one.

Slideshows ARE the new black

Slideshows are the way forward. Last night I went to one organised by the ASA Collective, who regularly organise such events. The first event of theirs I went to was one they did in conjunction with Contact Editions, who also regularly organise "Slideshow Slams"; two projections shown simultaneously, each curated by a different organisation. These tend to be mingling, social events, with the slideshows occuring in the background, whereas last night's event was a sit down affair; each photographer's show went on for maybe 10 minutes, accompanied by sound, and then the photographer said a few words about their work and there was an opportunity for questions.

To me, this is the future of photography; or at least, the future of showing photography. Either set-up, be it two projections at once or a more formal event, are great ways of showing work. The first time I came across the idea was in Arles last year, and it blew me away. The thing is you can showcase so much more work in a slideshow, with many more photographers. And this suits what the industry has become; most photographs, if not taken digitally, are digitised at some point for websites etc, and there are many more photographers than ever before, making it all the more competitive to get exhibition space. And then there's the cost - printing and framing work gets very expensive, and yet a projection is, essentially, free (once a good projector and screen is bought!)

It's not easy putting on a good slideshow, though. It's not just a case of lining up some great images and pressing play. If sound is involved, it has to be good, and it has to go with the work. Sound plays on emotion so much that it can totally alter the way the images come across - sometimes it adds but it's terrible if it jars in some way. It's almost better if the sound is made or composed for the purpose of being with the images... a popular tune comes with all sorts of personal connotations.

Another consideration is how long each image is up for. This could potentially be the only negative point with a slideshow - your time in front of the image is preconsidered, so it's impossible to linger and impossible to go back. Perhaps now, with the Internet and the amount of images we are confronted with on a day to day basis, we can read visuals quicker and don't need to spend time in front of them. But I think that's a shame... contemplation in front of a photograph makes us see more, think more. So, in a slideshow set up, the longer the better.

©Chloe Dewe Matthews

All the work shown last night was by female photographers. A couple I was already familiar with, due to the firecracker website, but there were two projects which were new to me which I thought were excellent. The first was by Chloe Dewe Matthews, who immersed herself in the very macho world of banger racing to make her project Banger Boys of Britain. The images are arresting, disclosing an unfamiliar world, which, as she herself states on her website, "satisfies a common human urge; to create and destroy."

The other project which I was very happy to discover was Urban Cave, by Andrea Star Reese. These photographs of people who live in makeshift dwellings around New York (but don't want to be considered "homeless") tenderly portray a nomadic lifestyle, with all its trials and tribulations. Some of the images are raw, but to me these images show how resilient and proud these people are, living outside of conventional society.

So, go see some slideshows. You could start with the Slideshow Slam I'm organising at Photofusion on 19 May, in collaboration with Contact Editions. But this isn't just a plug. It's a genuine interest and enthusiasm for slideshows. I ♥ slideshows. Go see some.

Last Chance to see...

Friday sees the last day of AMPS/10, the Annual Members Show at Photofusion in Brixton. I'm sad to see it come down... over the last few months I have nurtured and created this, from selecting the work and working with the photographers to produce the work, to curating and hanging the work. It has been a very successful exhibition, and I'm really pleased to have been working closely with Miranda Gavin from Hotshoe. She judged the inaugural Hotshoe/Photofusion award (which went to Odette England for her project As Above, So Below) and she ran an event with our members about furthering their career in this world of photography.

Throughout the exhibition we have encouraged the public to vote for their favourite photographer; and last night I announced the winner: Vikram Kushwah. I am not surprised he captured the public's imagination... his images are reminiscent of fairytales and the world of Alice in Wonderland, and successfully combine the genres of fashion and fine art photography. Definately one to watch...

Little furry objects make me smile

Gosh it's been a long time since I last posted... November was a quiet month, and I put my mind to more personal matters (such as getting my bathroom re-done, which has the knock on effect that I can't continue shooting my current project because the room I use as a studio now looks more like an architectural rescue place. The whole project is now on hold til the New Year).

But I did have the honour of being a judge at the LCC MA Photography final exhibition. This is with my Photofusion hat on - each year Photofusion offers a prize to a graduate from the LCC MA course. I went to judge it this year with Director and fellow photographer Gina Glover; I must admit that work in MA shows tends to get a little repetitive, but there was one piece of work which was unlike any I had seen before.

Perhaps Finally Alone is a series of photographs of unidentifiable furry objects on plinths, set against wildly patterned backdrops. There is a playful exploration of textures, colours, and an uncertainty of what we are looking at. In some images, the furry object is very definately an animal; one can detect a tail, or some ears. In others, we realise we are looking at a human head of hair, or the plinth is a woman's shoulders. This play on what we are looking at challenges the viewer, and asks all sorts of questions about the nature of a photograph. It is a quirky, humourous series which made me smile... the photographer is Elisa Noguera, and the whole series can be seen on her website.