Miniclick Publication#1

Miniclic k

P U B L I C AT I O N # O N E

Marc h 2012

CONTENTS

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Editor ’s Letter Introduction Jo Metson Scott Lou Miller Inter view Agata Pietron Joy Stacey Inter view Abbie Trayler-Smit h Natasha Caruana & Afshin Dehkordi Natasha Caruana Eleanor O’Kane Ar ticle Maria Gruzdeva Laura Pannac k & Maja Daniels Laura Pannac k Louise Hobson Inter view Chloe Dewe Mat hews Lou Miller Ar ticle Alma Haser Contributors

EDITOR’S LETTER // Miranda Gavin effects of conflict on women and children’s lives across the globe. Matthews is, arguably, one of the most important women still working in the field today, although her legacy is often overlooked when talking about a new generation of female photographers.

Before there was a Daily Life category in the World Press Photo awards, Matthews was documenting behind-the-scenes and intimate daily-life stories.

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For the first Miniclick publication centring on the theme, Women in Focus, a series of photo spreads, interviews, features and discussions give voice to some of the women photographers working today in documentary, photojournalism and art photography. Together, they highlight some of the themes, approaches and concerns for practitioners in the field, and not just for photographers.

The mood is celebratory and the approaches are varied, ranging from documentary to constructed art images. However, they are all (hand) bound by a desire to tell stories and explore the parameters of an ever-changing medium. When Jim and Lou approached me to help with the publication and host the Miniclick Day event, I was more than happy to get involved. I care about photography with a passion and my work as a writer, photographer and educator has provided insights into the industry from a number of angles, often prompting me to ask the question of myself and others: what does it mean to be a woman working in photography today?

However, just because we are all women does not mean the question is answered in the same way: there is a multiplicity of experiences and attitudes to consider. To celebrate the centenary anniversary of International Women’s Day on 8 March 2011, I listed 20 women photographers and visual artists a day for five days on the Hotshoe blog, making 100 in total. All the women have had work featured in Hotshoe magazine, since I started working on the publication in 2004.

One of them is photojournalist Jenny Matthews whose book, ‘Women in War’, is a twenty-year visual and written testament to the devastating

As a woman in my late 40s, I’m aware that the F word (feminism) has come under attack and supporters of feminism are subject to negative stereotyping and popular misconceptions.

In many circles, it’s just not cool to be a feminist.

It appears that there’s a fear in speaking out, perhaps, because it may impact negatively on a woman’s career options and the way she is treated in the workplace. It’s OK to simply observe inequalities and list them, but what happens when you ask why, and challenge the status quo? I cannot forgo the historical and contemporary importance of the fight for suffrage and equality for women in political, social and economic life, globally.

This is not to take a reductive line and suggest that it’s the only factor to be considered, as many of the interviewees point out. But, for me as a woman of the world, and not just the UK, it remains key. As comedian Bridget Christie commented recently in an interview: “The real feminist of our times is Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year old Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban for wanting the same thing [Mary] Wollstonecraft did 221 years ago – the right for girls to be educated. We might look modern, but our battles are anything but.”

Miranda Gavin

INTRODUCTION // Women in Focus

In 1910, Mary Carnell established The Women’s Federation.

The group was intended as a support network and was set up to promote and further the work of a growing number of female photographers via regular exhibitions, discussions, lectures and demonstrations. Towards the end of its first year, the Federation began to engage with the exclusively male, Photographer’s Association of America. The merging of the groups at the end of the decade fuelled the lively debates surrounding issues of equality, and questions emerged about whether femaleled groups should be able to unite with their male-only counterparts? Should they want to, or would it be more beneficial to work separately, standing alone? Just over 100 years later, such debates still exist. Moreover, within the relatively privileged areas of the Western world, these questions often remain the elephant in the room.

Inspired by International Women’s Day, Miniclick has worked in partnership with writer, photographer and educator Miranda Gavin, to curate a programme of events for Women In Focus month. The programme of talks, workshops and discussions was designed to stimulate conversation around the subject of women in photography. Working within the photography industry, Fiona Rogers noticed an imbalance of male and female representation.

In light of this, she established Firecracker, an online platform dedicated to supporting and promoting women photographers from, or living in, Europe. Our collaboration with Firecracker led to our first Saturday Session, a day-long forum in which Fiona, and a handful of the many talented photographers she has showcased over the last few years, shared their work, thoughts and experiences within the photographic industry.

Alongside addressing and discussing the issues facing female photographers today, we were really keen to create a physical document that would exist as a celebration of some incredibly talented photographers. Fiona has selected some outstanding projects to be featured on the Firecracker platform, and we wanted our first publication to echo this positive ethos. Together with Jo Metson Scott’s project, The Grey Line, which was awarded the inaugural Firecracker Grant in 2012, this publication contains the work of commended photographers Abbie Trayler-Smith and Agata Pietron, alongside Women in Focus speakers Chloe Dewe Mathews and Maria Gruzdeva. To complement these works, we feature some fascinating and

innovative projects from Miniclick speakers, Laura Pannack, Natasha Caruana and Alma Haser, alongside articles and discussions by, or about, each of them.

We’re really grateful to all those who have contributed their images, words, time and ideas to this publication and to all our Miniclick events. We really wouldn’t be able to do what we do without input from the wider community.

Working on this programme, we quickly realised that what works for one generation, may seem dull and distant to the next, making discussion within the ever-changing community essential. We hope that these talks, discussions, workshops, videos, podcasts, articles and images will stimulate that discussion and keep it going; providing a platform for the larger photographic community of all ages, sexes, genders and races, to meet together, exchange ideas, and most importantly, just talk.

Welcome to Issue #1!

Jim Stephenson and Lou Miller

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PHOTO STORY // The Grey Line Jo Metson Scott

The Grey Line is a reflection on war told from the perspectives of US and UK soldiers who have spoken out against the Iraq War.

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Photographer Jo Metson Scott began working on this project in 2007, after meeting a young US soldier who had recently gone AWOL as a result of being denied Conscientious Objective status and in order to avoid redeployment to Iraq. There began a journey that took her across the US over several years in search of veterans who had similarly been morally opposed to the war, and who had spoken out against it, at varying costs. Metson Scott’s work looks to a growing movement of young men and women who chose to fight for their country but began to question what they were being ordered to do – at a time where the legality of the war was also being disputed internationally.

Whilst the Iraq War remains polemic and has created complex debates on morality, The Grey Line examines details of these soldiers’ lives through photography and interviews in an attempt to capture the essence of what made these men and women take position.

The work is being published to mark 10 years since the invasion of Iraq.

Jo Metson Scott Jo Metson Scott was born in 1978 and grew up in Nottingham. Following graduation with a first class honours degree from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Jo worked with Spring and later assisted Kayt Jones. She has exhibited in the UK and Europe, including the London College of Fashion, Arles Photography Festival and 54th Venice Biennale. In 2012, Jo was awarded the Firecracker Grant for her recently published book, The Grey Line.

Jo sees portraiture as a privilege, gently bringing out a sense of character in quiet, intimate moments.

She is fascinated by the drive and focus of talented people and by determination and courage in ordinary lives. The Grey Line, published in 2013

by Dewi Lewis Publishing, is based on a series of portraits of ex-soldiers and their reflections on the moral consequences of war. She is also working on a long-term documentary project following a young gymnast as his mind and body are sculpted by the pressures of training in Britain’s elite squad.

Clients include Skype, British Heart Foundation, Great Plains and Nike. Jo has been commissioned

by The New York Times, Dazed & Confused, Bon, i-D, The Telegraph Magazine , the Observer, The Independent, Casa de Abitare, b Magazine, Icon, Twin and Tank. Portrait sitters include Emma Watson, Claire Danes, Ladyhawke, Naomi Harris, Seasick Steve, and Vivienne Westwood.

Jo lives and works in London. www.jometsonscott.co.uk // @jometsonscott

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INTERVIEW // Firecracker’s Fiona Rogers Lou Miller many people believe this sort of dialogue is vital; but equally, some people have asked whether it’s a discussion that still needs to be had today. What are your thoughts on this?

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On March 2nd 2013, Miniclick curators Jim Stephenson and Lou Miller joined forces with the creator of Firecracker, Fiona Rogers, for the first Miniclick Saturday Session: Women in Focus. Inspired by International Women’s Day (8 March) and the Firecracker ethos, the event was conceived as a means to promote and support current female photographers and open channels of dialogue within the community via discussion of the photographers’ work and experiences. Lou spoke to Fiona in advance of the event to find out more about Firecracker, her thoughts on the Women in Focus theme and the ways in which Firecracker supports women photographers within the industry today.

Lou Miller (LM): You established Firecracker in 2011 to help promote and support female photographers who might otherwise not have the opportunity to show work. How effective do you feel the platform has been in its aims and how has Firecracker been received within the industry?

Fiona Rogers (FR): I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response and I’m greatly encouraged by the interest and support the website has attracted over the past few years. The website always functioned, in part, to connect photographers with industry professionals. From featured photographer feedback and social media circulation, I think this has been achieved. I’m hoping that a new section of the monthly newsletters, which will feature a relevant new exhibition, book or event, will increase this exposure too.

LM: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you wanted to establish Firecracker as a means to redress the balance of representation of male and female practitioners within photography. In getting ready for this event, it has been clear to us that

FR: It’s a subject that always receives a mixed response. Some people feel it’s a continued and necessary discussion, and others feel it’s irrelevant to contemporary issues. I don’t think it has an effect on the quality of work we see from women photographers, but rather on the quantity. For me, the numbers are indicative of a higher proportion of male photographers actively working. Professionally, I regularly encounter more men than women. It’s the same for friends of mine who also work in photography. I’d hope that Firecracker provokes a little thought and consideration around this.

LM: Last year saw Jo Metson Scott awarded the inaugural Firecracker Grant for her work, The Grey Line. What is the process for choosing a winner for the Grant; are there certain things that you’re looking for?

FR: Well, it’s only been one year, but I hope that in the tradition of great documentary, the grant will attract and promote great visual storytelling.

There are no specific criteria, other than it should be a previously started project. I hope that the photographers who apply will see the value in having their work seen by our judges, as much as in competing for the funding.

LM: And how do you feel the grant has helped Jo, specifically?

FR: I’m so pleased we awarded the grant to Jo. It was really tough on the judges as there was some stiff competition, particularly from Agata (Pietron) and Abbie (Trayler-Smith), who we commended, as we didn’t want their hard work to go unrecognised. Jo is so modest and her project so pertinent with the recent Iraq anniversary.

I hope she’s found the exposure useful. I know that the funding made the commitment to her new book easier and great publishers like Dewi Lewis became more accessible.

LM: Alongside the Firecracker Grant, are you making any plans to work towards in-situ exhibitions with the featured photographers, or promote work through your own zines, books, or publications?

FR: It’s hard to balance Firecracker with such a demanding full time job, but I’m hoping to make

an announcement regarding a new project very soon. I don’t think I will be in a position for a little while to organise something regularly, however, through collaboration, anything is possible.

LM: I understand that your inspiration for Firecracker came from Lee Grant’s Light Journeys website (http://lightjourneys.net.au), which promotes Australian Women Photographers.

Do you have any future plans to link up with associated platforms to open up international channels of dialogue?

FR: We always talk about it! But she’s an incredibly busy person and we’ve just never found the time to coordinate something. We’d love to do a crosscountry residency with Australian and European photographers though, so watch this space!

LM: Do you feel that people have become complacent about the issue of equal representation and that platforms such as Firecracker encourage people to address the issue and provoke a dialogue?

FR: I would like to think that Firecracker has gone a little way to people reconsidering their usual choice for commissions, instead of reaching for the same photographers time and again.

I hope that the website is becoming a resource for professionals looking at commissioning photographers. Ultimately it’s about showing great work.

LM: Finally, what would you hope to achieve with Firecracker in the long term?

FR: It would be great to see more of the featured photographers having further commercial success and for the website to function as a commissioning platform. I’ve just commissioned Chloe Dewe Mathews for a project in the Douro region of Portugal, and would love to give this kind of opportunity to more photographers, as well as getting something formal off the ground with Light Journeys. I hope that we can continue with the legacy of the grant and support photographers financially and professionally.

Magnum Cultural and Education Manager, Fiona Rogers established the Firecracker site in 2011.

In 2012 Fiona set up the Firecracker Grant for a female photographer either living in, or from Europe, to assist with a documentary photographic project. Alongside promotion on the Firecracker platform, a monthly e-newsletter is circulated.

The website features approximately 20-30 images from a project by one female photographer each month. Once shown, the work will remain part of the Firecracker archive, which is accessible through the site.

Interested in submitting your work? Sign up to the newsletter and visit the Firecracker website www.fire-cracker.org

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PHOTO STORY // War Songs Agata Pietron

Discovering Rap, Hip-Hop, and Youth in Eastern Congo

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War has shaped their lives.

Many of the young people in these images were less than few years old when the genocide in Rwanda caused millions of refugees to flee into South and North Kivu, causing instability, humanitarian crisis, genocide and domestic war in their homeland.

Now, as teenagers and young adults, they recall that time, and their first and worst memories.

What they remember from the period later was not much better. Usually they don’t have a say in how they’re perceived: they are seen as victims, killers or freaks. Living in one of the most dangerous and dreadful places in the world, where war lasted for two decades, these young hip-hop, rap and RnB musicians (Dangerous, Young Boys, B2K, Kashmal, Lille Cent, Peace Life, Victory and many others) just want to rebuild their lives.

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Photo Captions

Agata Pietron

Rutshuru // Nord Kivu // Democratic Republic of Congo

Agata Pietron is an independent photographer, journalist, cinematographer and graphic designer currently based in Warsaw, Poland. She received her Master’s Degree from the Cultural Studies at University of Warsaw, and studied Photography in European Academy of Photography and Cinematography in Academy of Film and Television. She has worked on social projects in Eastern Europe, Latin America, USA and Central Africa (DRC, Rwanda). Her works have been exhibited in Poland and abroad. One of the works from “one degree of warmth” story was acquired

by Princess Royal Anne collection.

1 // Amani, Serge and Ukizelawi from B2K band walking in Murambi neighborhood.

2 // Moses, Serge with his youngest sister Nicole, Joseph, Amani, Ukizelawi and Serge’s aunt in front of Serge’s home.

3 // Eric Kapitula (singing) and the Dangerous group during the concert in Kaoze Cultural Center.

Giving tips, directly into singers pocket, on the stage, during performance is very popular.

4 // Members of the Rutshuru and Kiwanja music scene at the backstage during concert in local, dodgy “Hotel Rutshuru”.

5 // Girl from “Filles du Monde” fashion show group at the backstage during concert in “Hotel Rutshuru”.

6 // Moses from B2K group with borrowed necklace. They can’t afford buying themselves necklaces and rings so sometimes they borrow them for the special occasions.

7 // Members of the Rutshuru rap scene at the backstage during concert in local, dodgy “Hotel Rutshuru”. Ticket for the concert costs around 20 cents and many youngsters cannot afford it so they try to get inside via back doors.

www.agatapietron.com

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INTERVIEW // Abbie Trayler-Smith & Laura El-Tantawy Joy Stacey

ATS: It’s been organic, I wouldn’t say it’s my choice; I think that’s what’s come to me. It’s what I’ve responded to over the years, and especially now I’m a mum, I’m becoming even more interested in those issues.

JS: And are you ever concerned that you may have been typecast in this direction?

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Gender inequality within broader global society remains profoundly present. As such, working as a female photographer within a patriarchal society prompts a multitude of questions. How will you be treated?

Does gender play a role in gaining access?

Does gender affect a photographer’s perspective at all, and if so, does it affect the nature of the images taken? From personal experience this has not been the case, but I am conscious that many of the women that I have met through my own work in Palestine were unable to exercise the same freedoms. In order to explore these issues more fully, I spoke with Abbie Trayler-Smith and Laura el-Tantawy; two women whose diverse experiences I felt would offer fascinating insight into the discourse surrounding women in photography today.

Abbie Trayler-Smith is a Welsh photojournalist, based in London, whose work for Panos Pictures deals with conflict and disaster worldwide.

Trayler-Smith has photographed in countries from the Sudan and Rwanda to Sri Lanka, exploring issues of motherhood, women’s education, rape and prostitution.

Joy Stacey (JS): Abbie, looking though your work it appears that even when you work on stories that are not specifically about women, you build relationships with women and with families. Is that a fair reading?

Abbie Trayler-Smith (ATS): I think it’s fair that I’ve always been sent on assignments where NGOs know that, as a woman, I can get better access, and that those issues always tend to be around gender disparity and the rights of women.

JS: Is that your choice or the choice of those who commission you?

ATS: I suppose that’s what I was worried about all along, but I think you respond to what life throws at you and the experiences you have.

It’s not that I’m not interested in men’s issues, but when I have the opportunity to go to another part of the world to see how a different society is and to try and make some kind of sense of this, it’s a privilege. If that means being typecast for certain jobs, that’s fine by me, as long as I’m coming at it from my perspective and I’m not staid in my point of view, then I’m doing my job.

JS: One project that has particularly caught my attention is, The Mothers of Yemen, in which you work in a Yemeni maternity ward. It’s wonderful to see such an intimate side to the lifestyles of women who are so covered in every respect.

ATS: I felt that those pictures didn’t show half of it, because so much of what I saw I wasn’t allowed to photograph. Yet interestingly, I was allowed greater access than I would be given as a man. It’s strange working in countries like Yemen, or other developing countries where there is a disparity between genders. As a foreigner, you are an unknown quantity because you’re a foreign woman and a working woman. You’re not bound by the same cultural rules and traditions.

JS: What about the relationships you built with the men in the more patriarchal societies, how do they compare?

ATS: It seems to me, that as a woman you get access to both the men’s world and the women’s world, whereas men don’t necessarily get access to women. Maybe I don’t get in to the men’s world as deeply but I don’t think that’s been the case in my experience.

JS: Photographer Jenny Matthews said that, “as bearers of life, women usually have a much more emotional relationship to conflict”. Have you found that to be true?

ATS: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. I was working for The Telegraph in Iraq in 2003, covering the aftermath of the war and I had a colleague there from a TV station who asked to

look at my images. I showed him my pictures and he joked, ‘Oh there’s no guns in any of them, where have you been for the last five weeks?’.

And I was thinking; Well I’ve been photographing what’s going on in the streets; how life is functioning and how people function when their city has been blown up.

JS: The decision to focus on the details of individual lives rather than on the central drama is a strong theme within your work. You often work in peoples homes, telling the stories of families. What do you feel draws you to these situations?

ATS: What every single person in the world has in common, even if they have no family, is the concept of family. If you can get straight to the heart of that then you can get straight to the heart of what is going on, and often, women are at the heart of those families. I’d much rather be in the kitchen with the women, than be in the lounge with the men.

Abbie Trayler-Smith’s work builds on common ground between herself and her subjects, allowing her to comment on wider social issues through her intimate portrayal of individuals or family units.

Despite the intimacy with which she portrays her subjects, Trayler-Smith’s view is, ultimately, that of an outsider – indeed, she is able to work outside the social bounds that would otherwise be ascribed to her. With these notions of access in mind, I spoke to Egyptian photographer Laura El-Tantawy. El-Tantawy is a freelance photographer living between Cairo and London, who has been working in Egypt since 2005, and whose images intimately explore her own society in a time of great upheaval and transition.

Joy Stacey (JS): Despite the hope that grew in the early days of Tahrir Square, violence against women in Egypt appears to have increased, and the growing power of Islamist politicians has sparked serious concerns for the equality of women. As an Egyptian woman, what impact has this had upon your role as a photographer?

Laura El-Tantawy (LET): What you describe is true, but there have also been great achievements for women since the revolution. Women are now stronger than any other time, and I believe this intensity will continue as Egypt’s unfinished revolution continues. As a photographer, I always work alone in the field, but given recent attacks on women, I have found myself feeling intimidated while working alone. I am trying to be realistic about what can happen and I am weighing things a bit differently while I’m working now.

JS: The writing of history is dominated by men, and your work in Egypt is an intimate social and historical document which you intend to make into a book. Do you think that gender impacts the record of history and do you feel that there needs to be any push to a gender balance among those collectively recording events?

LET: I am not one to think of gender inequalities in general. If I want to do something I do it. I do believe gender makes a difference on perception and impression. My work in Egypt is a personal

story that draws a parallel between my own life and that of a country in transition. This would of course be different were a male photographer making the work.

JS: In the chapter Casualty, you pair images of those shot by police in the revolution with portraits of female family members and their personal accounts of events. Could you explain your decision to use this strategy?

LET: This chapter is intended to document the long-term and life changing consequences of the revolution on Egyptian families. I wanted to show the family members close to the loved ones they lost and made the decision to focus on their female survivors. It is an on going series and the sequencing on my website is based on colour palette and general feel rather than anything philosophical.

The speculative nature of discussing gender is something I have become acutely aware of in writing this piece. Abbie Trayler-Smith’s experiences as an outsider have suggested that, in many societies, issues of nationality are of greater significance in regard to gaining access.

She also raises the interesting issue of motherhood, and the personal impact that this has had on her work. Laura El-Tantawy’s discussion of safety within her role as a photographer may be specifically in relation to the current political climate in Egypt, yet one cannot help but contemplate how many women globally have concerns about working alone. Attributing specific individual experiences exclusively to gender inequalities, belies the complexity of the discourse surrounding women in photography today. But what is clear is that, whilst Abbie Trayler-Smith and Laura El-Tantawy have extremely different thoughts, both photographers are aware of the ways in which their own lives and experiences are essential to the making of their work.

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PHOTO STORY // The Big ‘O’ Abbie Trayler-Smith

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The stigma that surrounds and engulfs obesity has meant my fat teenage years have remained buried, gnawing away at me, and leaving me with unanswered questions and uncomfortable feelings.

Why did I get fat? How did it happen?

And in truth what effect has it had on my life?

Would things have been different if I’d been a perfect size 10?

The psychological effects of being fat in a society which values thinness above all else concern me as much as the obvious effects of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Being overweight or obese is deemed to be self inflicted, or even a lifestyle choice and the ‘culprit’ labeled, fat, lazy, greedy, thick. Obesity has taken over from cancer as the thing to fear, The Big “O”, with its stigma and discrimination following the overweight from the schoolyard to the workplace and beyond.

In the UK 1 in 3 children are classified as overweight or obese and we have the fattest kids in Europe.

My aim with this work is for it to be an intimate and personal portrait of the children behind these dramatic statistics.

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Photo Captions

Abbie Trayler-Smith

1 // Chelsea, 19, on holiday in Skegness with her mum Lisa, boyfriend Lee 39, and nephew Cory.

Abbie Trayler-Smith was born in 1977 and grew up in South Wales. Whilst studying for her law degree at Kings College London she began taking photographs for the student newspaper.

Completely self-taught, she began working for the Daily Telegraph on a regular basis after graduating in 1998. She was given a full time contract for the paper in 2001.

2 // Chelsea on holiday in Skegness with her mum Lisa.

3 // Shannon, age 15, is trying to eat heathily in the run up to her school Prom.

4 // Shannon, age 15, goes for a spray tan.

5 // Shannon, age 15, gets ready for her school Prom, Sheffield.

6 // Shannon, age 15 at her School Prom in Sheffield.

7 // Shannon at home in her bedroom.

Nine years on she has completed a huge variety of assignments: from the final burial of Haile Selassi in Ethiopia to the forgotten war in Sudan, the famine crisis in Malawi and anniversaries at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii and the Falkland Islands.

More recently she covered the tsunami and re-visited Banda Aceh one year on. She has visited Iraq, photographed the Rwandan killing fields for the ten-year anniversary and reported on the conflict in Darfur, Sudan with the veteran journalist Bill Deedes.

In September 2006, Abbie resigned from her contract position at The Daily Telegraph in order to freelance for a wider variety of clients and devote more time to personal projects. She is now represented by Panos Pictures in London. www.abbietraylersmith.com // @abbiets

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IN CONVERSATION // The Adventures of a Female Photographer Natasha Caruana & Afshin Dehkordi

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Photographic artist Natasha Caruana and her artist partner Afshin Dehkordi, take a pause in their six year relationship and take a dictaphone to bed to discuss Natasha’s work.

Natasha Caruana (NC): I know it’s a bit late, but we keep putting this off. As we’re in bed early, can we have a chat about my work?

What do you think about it?

Afshin Dehkordi (AD): Well to start, I like the way you experiment. I like the way you don’t follow the mainstream. Your work consciously turns its back on the archetypical beautifully composed aesthetic, which is so prevalent in photography today, because it has no appeal to you. Weaving in an autobiographical element shifts your work from mere photography to art.

NC: That’s a very grand statement to make!

And, put your feet down! You’re letting the cold air in under the duvet.

AD: Sorry! Yes, a photographer will not reveal a great deal about themselves that leaves them exposed and vulnerable. They will have a particular photographic style or aesthetic, an identity. But they don’t reveal content that is explicitly autobiographical. Whereas your work does leave you open to personal criticism, to a certain extent you are vulnerable.

NC: Yes, but there are two sides to that vulnerability.

Using something that’s autobiographical allows you to dig a bit deeper. I don’t think I would have been making the same work today if I hadn’t made, ‘The Other Woman’. When I went out there and met these women who were in the same situation as myself, I began to understand more about society. I saw that I didn’t just have to be the ‘mistress’ or a ‘bunny boiler’, and that being

with a married man was not so clearcut as society deems it to be. To see other people in that situation, you feel a sense of community; an affinity.

Yet, in a way, that exposure leaves you open for attack. For instance, recently, the work, ‘Married Man’, for which I dated 80 married men, has got a lot of press. I recall the train journey back from Brighton to London when the work had been published on the Huffington Post website. I think there were about 500 comments about the work, and particularly about me. You were asleep, so I started scrolling through them. People were saying that I was a ‘bitch’, that, ‘This woman should be shot for making this work’, and ‘Oh great, another pathetic female making images about men. Well done, Oscar!’ You know, all those sort of comments. I think I woke you up and I said ‘ Afshin, I need you to pull me out of this!’ You talk about being exposed, but there is this by-product; some people get very angry.

AD: You have to detach what’s written as comments on a website from your personal life.

You also have to recognise they’re taking your series, that has been developed in an art context, and transplanting it into mainstream media.

The context within which it is presented is a determining factor as to how it’s received.

NC: It’s amazing how many people refer to me being female in these comments. You know, here’s another pathetic woman discussing love and relationships.

AD: I think that if you flipped it around to a male photographer taking pictures of women, who wanted to have an affair, then there would probably be an equal number of people saying he was a ‘dirty old man’.

NC: Yes, I suppose. A very timely example would be Mishka Henner’s, ‘No Man’s Land’ series, that used screen grabs pulled from Google maps of prostitutes from street-view images. He is often scrutinised for, as you have just said,being another guy exposing women who can’t fight back.

What I find particularly interesting are female photographers who have gone out there and occupied the space of being an adventurer where, normally, a male photographer would exist.

Two exhibitions that really spoke to me were, ‘Diane Arbus, Revelations’, at the V&A (2005), and ‘The Art of Lee Miller’, also at the V&A

(2007-8). Seeing Arbus’ sketchbook and having this view of her wandering the streets documenting peoples’ lives. Looking at her contact sheets revealed the way she captured, yet part constructed, the bizarre in people. She was as brave in the edit as in her shooting. There is also an image from the Lee Miller exhibition that I have had in my mind; a portrait of her sitting in Hitler’s bath. An incredible shot. The caption reads, ‘Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub’. I mean, it’s amazing. Eve Arnold, a five-foot Jewish woman photographing the American Nazi leader in 1961, actually had the balls to stand up with her camera and face these people and take pictures where she wouldn’t normally be occupying that space. There are so many other female photographers I hold up, too many to mention. But then working as a lecturer in Farnham, I see the majority of my classes are female and I constantly wonder where do these women go? The photography community is so male dominated.

the studio, and then returning to domestic life at home. You obviously have those creative thought processes ticking away in the back of your mind and you don’t clock off necessarily. You can have very personal stories and put them out there - and probably the more one does it the easier it gets without having the kickback and feeling like you are taking a lot of flak. Once you put it out there it gets a life of its own anyway.

AD: I think you have to factor in a lag effect.

It’s only recently that photographic degree courses have really grown in number, attracting a lot more female students. It will take time for them to filter into the industry. Hopefully, in years to come, we’ll find that imbalance addressed.

Thereis a transition period. The 1970s, 80s, and some would say the 90s were dominated by photojournalism and commercial photography, both of which are very male orientated but photojournalism has changed; it doesn’t have the same footprint as it had before. I mean the key thing for the young female students is to feel that they have the right, the confidence and the support to fill any role out there, be it in photojournalism, art or any other strand.

NC: You don’t own it at all. You give birth to it, as they would say.

NC: True. But in my experience I just made work.

I almost put myself in a little bubble. I wasn’t so much fighting for an audience. I never sent stuff to people. I suppose I always made the work for myself.

Feel free to add to the conversation @natashacaruana @afshindehkordi

AD: But you stopped. For two years after the RCA, you didn’t make any work.

NC: I was malfunctioning. It was at a very low point after the RCA. It was a lot down to you, and your support, that meant that I was able to continue making work. I had started, Married Man, at the RCA and I made five images, and then six months passed after I had left. At that point, Alistair Robinson at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art got in touch and said, ‘Let’s get you some funding and let’s finish this work properly and have a show. It’s fantastic.’

He was very encouraging in helping me to finish that work. I suppose that’s a negative side to making something that’s personal. When things don’t sit right, when you’re working a lot with your intuition, you are working very sensitively.

AD: It’s a balancing act. I have spoken to artists who counter the myth of the artist as a tortured soul, who has flashes of inspiration or is in constant turmoil. The truth is, it’s closer to dropping the kids off at school, going to the studio, working at

The most important part of being an artist is the work that you produce. But stepping back from this, there are a whole series of steps to consider; there is the research phase, the development, bringing in the appropriate kind of support and assistance, or using professional curators and your peers as sounding boards. Even writing proposals and your artist statement, keeping your website updated, these things are rarely instilled in students. Ultimately, you just have to get in the habit of making work, getting it out there and understanding that process.

AD: Yeah. You’ve got to take the long view.

NC: And, not worry too much about failure.

AD: You’ve got to embrace failure.

NC: I always come back to my motto for making work, ‘When you’re feeling uncomfortable then that’s when interesting things are happening.’

If things are feeling uncomfortable, I’m in new territory!

AD: Feel comfortable feeling uncomfortable.

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PHOTO STORY // Portraits of the ‘Other Woman’ Natasha Caruana

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I became the ‘other woman’ on February 23rd, 2003. The relationship started, like most affairs, with feelings of naughty excitement. I previously had such respect for marriage but now seemed to enjoy transgressing my established moral boundaries – immersing myself in the risky thrill of it.

I was consumed by the fantasy of expensive gifts, secretive dinners and weekends away, spending little time reflecting upon the reality of my situation. Most feelings of guilt were repressed by a desire to maintain my romantic illusions.

On our second anniversary I decided to take my camera with me to photograph our time together only to realise that it wouldn’t be possible. This fact awakened me to the deceit at the heart of the relationship - allowing me to see beyond my naivety and understand the repercussions of our affair.

My personal experience became the genesis for the work ‘Lying Still’. I set out to meet and document the experiences of women like myself – to find out how they felt about being the ‘Other Woman’ and to help me come to terms with my own situation. I placed ads in ‘Time Out’ magazine and numerous local papers asking for women whom were in relationships with married men and were willing to share their story.

The series explores the range of stories and diversity of women whom have experienced affairs with married men – questioning the secretiveness and unease felt by the majority of them. Many continue with their relationships, some recognising it is a ‘half-life’; others enjoy the risqué adventure of their liaisons, whilst many have ended their relationships no longer willing to deal with the emotional instability.

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Natasha Caruana

1 // Natahsa

Born in 1983 Caruana is a practising artist, lecturer of photography and founding director of the London based studioSTRIKE artists studios.

She graduated from an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in 2008 and is currently a lecturer of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey.

2 & 3 // Penny 4 // Lizanne 5 // Elaine

Caruana’s own art practise is grounded in research, drawing from archives, the Internet and personal narratives. Her series ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Married Man’ documents love and life of the everyday. Caruana’s works have been exhibited in various group shows, such as Invisible Adversaries, alongside Francesco Goya and John Constable and The Fool at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary of Art, Sunderland. Previous group and solo exhibitions have been in The United States, Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Her work is held in the collections of the British Library, Woman’s Library in the UK and the Laguna Art Museum and The Kinsey Institute in the United States.

Her work was shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards in 2007 and the Deutsche Bank Pyramid prize in 2008. In 2010 Caruana was named as the one to watch in the Royal Photographic Society Journal, featured in the British Journal of Photography and selected by the Humble Arts Foundation as one of 18 leading female art photographers working in the UK. www.natashacaruana.com // @NatashaCaruana

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ARTICLE // Photography’s Pioneering Women Eleanor O’Kane vintage clothes, in the nude or hidden behind mirrors and often blurred by the use of long exposures have the same delicacy as Cameron’s images. However, as powerful studies of the female form, they belong to the twentieth century. Woodman’s exit from photography was more tragic: she committed suicide in 1981, aged just 22, leaving behind an archive of images that are as rich as Cameron’s.

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Within 30 years of the first photograph taken of a human, a female photographer was making the gentlemen of Victorian England hot under their pristinely starched collars. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) received her first camera in 1863 from her daughter, who hoped it would keep her 48 year-old mother amused whilst her father worked abroad. With her pre-existing knowledge of photographic printing and composition, the eccentric and adventurous Cameron seized on her new hobby with zeal, and she endeavoured to create high art and posed friends and family as classical or religious figures.

Cameron created and catalogued series after series of images, working with the diligence of a professional. She approached photography with an innovative pictorial sensibility, eschewing the sharply focused clarity that was considered desirable at the time, creating instead her signature soft focus images, which, she felt, captured something of her sitters’ spirit. Despite the criticism she endured from the patriarchal photography world, Cameron determinedly followed her heart and submitted her images to art institutions and competitions. Her resolve was rewarded with great success and Cameron delighted in the praise she eventually received from the art world. Thanks to Cameron’s fastidious record keeping, a collection of around 900 original images remain, allowing future generations to access her images in various archives worldwide, and recognise her as the true innovator she was.

The rarefied images of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) in many ways echo those of her Victorian predecessor. Both women valued ideas over technique and, like Cameron, Woodman has received more acclaim in death than in life.

Self-portraits of the photographer dressed in

While Cameron and Woodman were both frustrated by society’s indifference to their talents, American street photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) never sought recognition.

Her life is only just being pieced together now, as is her archive of some 100,000 negatives and hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film, that were thought lost and later rediscovered at an auction in 2007. Little is known of Maier, who was an outsider for much of her existence as well as a free spirit, and although she appears in some of her photographs, sometimes it is just as a shadow cast on a pavement. What is clear is that Maier’s urge to record the world around her resulted in some of the best and most interesting street photography of the second half of the twentieth century. This impulse for record keeping is also apparent in the work of Hilla Becher (1934-), who, with her husband Bernd, relentlessly catalogued industrial structures for almost 50 years. The resulting archive exists as great inspiration for generations of photographers, most notably for two of the most successful contemporary photographers today, Dusseldorf alumni Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky.

The male-dominated world of photojournalism has produced some notable female trailblazers, including Gerda Taro and the unassuming heroine of British photography, Grace Robertson. Taro (1910-1937), along with her collaborator and lover Robert Capa, changed the face of war photography while documenting the Spanish Civil War from the frontline. Independent, fearless and highly political, Taro’s images of war were charged with emotion. Capa’s famous tenet, ‘If your images aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough’ had tragic consequences for Taro, who was killed by a tank as she covered a battle in Spain. Aged just 26, she was the first female photojournalist to be killed while covering a war.

As the most prominent female photojournalist of the Second World War, Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller (1907-1977) is perhaps most famous for a picture she didn’t shoot – a portrait of the former model in Hitler’s bath taken by LIFE photographer David

E. Scherman, with whom she covered many stories.

Born in New York, Miller moved to Europe to become Man Ray’s photographic assistant, as well as his muse and lover. During the Second World War, Miller was embedded with the US Army as the official war photographer for Vogue. While billeted at Hitler’s Munich apartment, Scherman photographed Miller bathing in the dead dictator’s bathtub, her heavy, sludge-encrusted boots on the bathmat contrasting with the classical femininity of her pose. Miller is said to have considered the act a modest victory in the aftermath of the horror she’d witnessed that same day while photographing at Dachau concentration camp.

As a young woman, Grace Robertson (1930-) met with puzzlement and derision for her choice of a career as a photojournalist. The daughter of Picture Post editor Fyfe Robertson, she published her early work under the name Dick Muir to avoid accusations of nepotism, and was shunned by some friends who deemed her career choice unbecoming of her sex. At six feet two inches tall, Robertson was not easy to miss and she chose to spend as much time as possible with her subjects so that they eventually overlooked her stature. In doing so, this quiet revolutionary produced some of her best work and created definitive studies of British post-war women at work and play.

Women photographers have often been seen as outsiders, not only within the photographic sphere, but also in challenging the notion of what a women should be. Despite taking pictures continuously since the mid-seventies, Sally Mann (1951-) is still defined by her 1992 series Immediate Family, a collection of intimate and often uneasy images of her children, who are sometimes photographed without clothes. Mann defended the images as natural and shot through the eyes of a mother, yet she was condemned by members of the religious Right in the US, who accused her of producing pornography; so much so that one image was censored in the Wall Street Journal.

Despite this, Mann continues to confront the uncomfortable, using her camera to examine subjects such as death and race in US society.

As a phenomenally successful artist, Cindy Sherman (1954-) has broken the glass ceiling for sales of art photography. In 1999 the average price of one of her photographs ranged from $20,000-$50,000, while in 2011 one of her images sold at auction for $3.89 million. Sherman’s reconfiguration of the self-portrait depicts the artist, variously, as historical characters, film stars, housewives and pin-ups, and utilises props or art-world techniques to underscore the deceit. In casting herself as model, stylist and art director, Sherman questions conventional portrayals of women. In contrast to Sherman’s constructed self-portraits, photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (1966-) deals with real-world stereotypes, exploring troubling aspects of US culture through creating multimedia projects, such as Fast Forward, Girl Culture and Thin. Her recent documentary on wealth and excess, The Queen of Versailles, received a Directing Award at the Sundance Festival in 2012.

Nan Goldin’s infamous images of the New York’s Bowery subculture of the 1970s and 1980s, with their explicit depictions of drug use, sex and violence, brought compassion and tenderness to subjects that had previously only been portrayed in news images. Producing deeply personal work from within her own circle of friends, Goldin never saw herself as a voyeur. Her well-known work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency includes a selfportrait of a bloodied and bruised Goldin, taken in 1984 and showing herself as a victim of domestic abuse. Unlike Cindy Sherman’s women, Goldin in Nan One Month After Being Battered isn’t roleplaying; there are no props and no tricks. Goldin, with her pictures of New York drag queens, has been compared with Diane Arbus (1923-1971), whose desire to photograph outcasts and circus freaks reflected her own feelings of incongruity within the world. Unlike Goldin, whose work is almost akin to a photo diary, Arbus is considered by many as a voyeur; one whose subjects often stare back at the camera.

These free-spirited and courageous females have pushed photography forward, intentionally or unintentionally, as they tell stories, create art or beauty, and show us worlds we would otherwise never know. Common threads surface looking at their various bodies of work: being ill at ease in the world; an almost overwhelming need to document; a desire to push buttons, and to question the status quo. Ultimately, it is the women themselves that have made the work so distinguished, which is why, despite more than 150 years of advancements in the photographic medium; we still celebrate the work they have produced from the 1860s to today.

In the words of the great Eve Arnold (1912-2012), who was the first women to join Magnum and was a strident advocate of female photographers, ‘It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.’

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PHOTO STORY // The Borders of Russia Maria Gruzdeva

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A complicated Soviet past, coupled with the vast geography of Russia, has made border territories a problematic area politically, physically and culturally. The inherent disturbance of boundaries, whether due to the process of unification or disintegration, has always been connected with the issue of self-loss. Border territories, as the most distant and disturbed areas of the country, illustrate as no other, the state of present-day Russia; how it is shaping its identity and its relationship with the Soviet consciousness, which it seeks to both outlive and preserve.

The project takes the approach of an ethnographical journey, an investigation of the political and cultural symbols we naturally, or artificially, embed in the surrounding landscapes to mark the territory with signifiers of our identity.

It explores the connection between the disturbance of territorial boundaries and identities, and serves as a study of cultural symbols associated with collective identity and landscape as its metaphoric representation.

The project is partly supported by IdeasTap.

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Maria Gruzdeva

1 // Cityscape, Sovetsk, Kaliningrad region.

Maria Gruzdeva is a Russian-born photographer based in London and a graduate of central saint Martins and lCC. Being physically away from her country of origin for the past few years, she is able to offer a unique perspective on processes taking place there, investigating into Russia’s post-soviet conscientiousness, identity and aesthetics.

2 // Soldiers carrying out public works, Korzunovo, Pechengsky district, Murmansk region.

3 // Painting, Border Guard base.

4 // Seascape, Azov sea.

5 // Man in Mask, combatant of the Alpha group, an elite Russian counter-terrorism unit.

She draws inspiration from the prominent Western artists and art theory, however issues connecting her native country’s past and present remain central to her work. She usually works on long-term documentary projects, underpinned by extensive research.

Her first major project Direction–space!, was exhibited internationally and published into a book by Dewi lewis publishing in 2011. www.fire-cracker.org/#/feature/4573203267

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IN CONVERSATION // On Women In Photography Laura Pannack & Maja Daniels out of eighty-four (there have been 11 women photographers in total), while in VU agency there are eight women out of 42.

There are five out of 21 at The Institute, and three out of 20 at Panos Pictures.

In terms of institutional representation within the ‘documentary genre’, clearly it’s not equal.

LP: It would be interesting to see how, in say, fifteen years these numbers may have shifted.

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Documentary photographers Maja Daniels (MD) and Laura Pannack (LP) discuss what it’s like for them to be a female photographer and the role of gender in striving for equality. They also catch up with some fellow female photographers to ask them their thoughts.

There’s a lot of discussion surrounding women in photography, with so many different opinions and approaches we found it difficult to know where to start. We tried to speak to women from a variety of generations to see if things have changed over time. A conversation with photographer Vanessa Winship about her experiences proved to be a useful starting point “I personally don’t see being a woman a barrier to being a photographer, not in the slightest.

What remains a giant elephant in the room is the remaining fact that women quite simply don’t get a representative amount of the air space. There’s no reason for this whatsoever. The same goes for so few voices being heard from black photographers out there, very few from the Middle East, male or female. There is a danger that you might get stuck talking about the unfairness of this and that - but then again, it still needs to be discussed until the balance of power is actually equal. To me it’s absurd to imagine history being told, spoken about, through the prism of a single gender or race.”

LP: So have we been fooling ourselves? Is the support and attention we are receiving clouding the fact that women really do get less air space in the industry as a whole?

MD: Women certainly aren’t on a level playing field when it comes to the distribution of work, especially when you look at the major agencies and some statistics. In the Magnum Photo agency there are currently only eight women photographers

MD: Definitely. I do think there’s pressure on agencies, such as Magnum, to get more women on board. We need to remember that people are taking pictures all over the world - it can’t be just the West talking about the rest of the world, or just one man talking about the world. I do think that changes are occurring; people are using more sensitive approaches. It almost seems to be a trend now that we are trying to find other ways of telling stories and finding alternatives. But then, of course, there is a danger that women will be allocated stories that they can only tell as they are women.

LP: True, but I think that, for the most part, the projects photographers concentrate on, in some way, have a deep-seated relation to their own identity. Whether that’s curiosity about their behavior, or social relationships, I think that’s just natural. We can relate to female issues in a different way.

MD: A lot of the photography that I admire is made by women, across a range of fields. I value it. I’m happy that I’m a woman photographer and I think that I have certain sensibilities and abilities and engage with people in a different way, although that’s probably prejudiced against men.

It’s very hard to speculate: you can only talk about what you know.

LP: And what about other cultural influences – what effect do those have?

MD: Working in Paris, I really noticed some differences - I found it more macho and gendered.

Perhaps it was also about being an outsider, I found it was a struggle to be taken seriously.

Assisting in Paris was also very male dominated.

LP: But I think that is a general issue regardless of location. I spoke with photographer Kate Peters about her experiences, and she felt that there is a definite link between gender and access, and it’s interesting that she points out that there are two sides to this:

“I do think gender plays a role, particularly with the subjects I’m working on at the moment that are related to representations of women and sexuality. I think as a woman photographing other women you can gain trust and access more easily. You also have a deeper understanding of the issues raised that affect women in general.

Although this definitely also works the other way around where access is restricted or more difficult because of gender.”

photographers that I know and I could almost guarantee that they all know each other.

MD: I used to hate hearing, “you’re a girl, you can’t be doing that, it’s very physical work.”

I found that attitude extremely frustrating, so I would also try to overcompensate and do other things, like being incredibly organised.

LP: What about age? Does ageing affect women more than men in the industry? It seems that around the age of 35 many female photographers drop off the radar. Perhaps this is the age when children become a priority. I wonder if removing yourself from such a fast-paced, ever-evolving industry makes it even harder to dive back in after the time out?

LP: I have to admit that I tend to work more with male assistants, despite finding it really frustrating that I lost opportunities to assist in the past because I was female. I just feel guilty asking a girl to lug most of the bags and I feel safer coming back on the tube with all the kit in early hours with a man.

MD: But despite all these challenges, we’re happy to be female in the photography world, in fact, we feel like we have certain privileges being female. So maybe we are given different opportunities, different types of access. Having said that, there is a noticeable underrepresentation in the industry. If you look at all the most successful people, they’re often men, you know. There are very few women like Annie Leibovitz in the industry.

LP: I wonder how Vanessa Winship would feel entering the industry now and if in the past she felt she was part of a minority. I get the impression that the way photographers are seen has massively shifted. I spoke to Leonie Hampton about this, and her experience was positive, she said that, “as women we are lucky – somehow I think more doors can be opened being a woman.” We don’t feel like we’re part of a minority now, in fact, we feel advantaged, that we’ve got more support around us. In relation to that, how do you feel about awards just for women?

MD: My gut feeling thinking about that is, do we really need those kinds of awards? Do we need that kind of recognition? And what does it say?

Does it push us further or does it say we’re less privileged or less capable?

LP: I see what you mean - if there was an award just for men I’d probably feel it was a bit unfair.

Do you think that men in some way feel that there’s too much attention on women?

MD: I think so. I imagine some men are thinking, what about me? I’m also here doing this! It’s a complicated issue isn’t it?

LP: One thing that does keep arising is that there are a huge number of female students on photography courses, but few of them actually pursue a career as a photographer.

MD: I’ve also noticed that we all seem to know each other, and I wonder if that’s also because there are less of us? I could list all the female

LP: Do you think that we feel the need to support each other?

MD: Yes, every time I hear of a female photographer, who’s based in and around London, I do feel like I want to meet her - it’s about a sense of community.

MD: I think that could be true.

LP: So Maja, how can we move forward and create a more equal market for photographers?

We both agree that photography is often about using smaller stories to tell the bigger picture.

Our aim is to educate and communicate social, political and environmental issues fairly and this can only be achieved by allowing for a variety of voices. Bigger agencies need to open up more widely, and commission photographers from all over the world to represent a more global vision.

MD: Also I think that regardless of gender; money plays a huge role today. I know that I feel quite lucky being Swedish in some ways, because you have more possibilities to get grants and education is free. However, in the UK education isn’t free and so it’s not an equal situation, for so many other reasons, apart from gender.

LP: So I think that what we’ve learnt today is that photography is unequal for a variety of reasons, not exclusively in relation to gender.

MD: Yes, although gender is certainly a necessary part of the debate.

Huge thanks to Vanessa Winship, Kate Peters, and Leonie Hampton for contributing to our conversation.

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PHOTO STORY // The Walks Laura Pannack

I learn the most when I walk with a camera; about myself and the company I share.

I engage. I stop mentally.

I listen.

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True discipline for me, is learning to decide when to experience and when to capture. The success of a walk must never be measured by the rolls expired.

I can reflect, relax and enjoy silence in the comfort that I have all the company I need hanging loosely from my right shoulder.

The majority of banter or silence I share with others can feel dominated by the activity that accompanies it. Being harnessed to a location limits what might occur. A walk doesn’t intrude on company. It holds it, encourages it, comforts and entertains it. Because it is what it is; always an experience.

These images are truth; they were taken with nothing but a desire to take them. There was no pressure, agenda or reason behind them.

They each have a tale, a place and a moment, all innocently experienced.

This project has no beginning or end. It is the diary of the moments I allow myself to escape, alone or with company. So where shall we walk today.? Anywhere…

Laura Pannack Laura Pannack is a London based Photographer.

She was educated at the University of Brighton Central Saint Martins College of Art and LCC. Her work has been extensively exhibited and published both in the UK and internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, The Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

In 2010 Laura received first prize in the Portrait Singles category of the World Press Photo awards. She has also won and been shortlisted for several other awards including The Sony World Photography Awards, The Magenta foundation and Lucies IPA. Her art focuses on social documentary and portraiture, and seeks to explore the complex relationship between subject and photographer.

Laura is driven by research led self-initiated projects. In her own words, she does all she can “to understand the lives of those captured, and to present them creatively”. She is a firm believer that “time, trust and understanding is the key to portraying subjects truthfully”, and as such, many of her projects develop over several years. Her particular approach allows a genuine connection to exist between sitter and photographer, which in turn elucidates the intimacy of these very human exchanges.

Her images aim to suggest the shared ideas and experiences that are entwined in each frame that she shoots. Laura largely shoots with a film camera on her personal projects, allowing her process to be organic rather than being predefined by fixed ideas, thus removing additional pressure on the sitter. www.laurapannack.com // @laurapannack

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INTERVIEW // Louise Clements & Helen Trompeteler Louise Hobson

sharing, liking or ‘pinning’ images. This year for MobFORMAT, I have been working with Misho.

Baranovic and the mobile photo app EyeEm to create the world’s first mass participatory mobile photo printing press. We are inviting photographers worldwide to submit images on the themes Work, Treasure and Trash. These images are being printed and exhibited during the festival and the audience is being invited to help curate an ever-changing exhibition.

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The ongoing conversation about women in photography often centres on female photographers, but of equal interest are the women that programme and curate exhibitions.

Two women, who play a role in selecting photography and influencing the ways in which we approach and experience the medium, are Louise Clements, Artistic Director and Cofounder of the international photography festival FORMAT and Curator of QUAD, and Assistant Curator of Photographs at The National Portrait Gallery Helen Trompeteler.

Interview with Louise Clements.

Louise Hobson (LH): How is FORMAT13 responding to how photography exists today?

Louise Clements (LC): The programme for FORMAT13 explores how photography continues to be relevant in the twenty-first century through the works of over 300 contributors curated around the theme of ‘Factory’. The festival takes place in the north of England in Derby, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is also regarded as the birthplace of mass production and is the site of the world’s first factory. Cutting across genres, the exhibitions, events and wider programmes explore the complex relationship between workers, products and machines. Through showing some of the best in contemporary photographic practice, the festival also considers how these relationships impact on our lives today, internationally and at home.

Photography is ubiquitous within our lives, be it from the advertising we encounter on a daily basis, photojournalism, or the still image as part of fine art practice and so on. Photography is also fun and integrated into our daily routines; we use photography in social networks, whether we are

LH: FORMAT’s programme is particularly diverse.

What is the thinking behind incorporating music, film and performance into a photography festival?

LC: Since I started the festival in 2004, my interest in cross artform collaboration has been part of my programming. I think the most interesting events reflect a contemporary mindset. Why should a photography festival consist of framed rectangles in lines on white walls? Why is it surprising that a festival should experiment and mix diverse activity with photography as a lead? People, in general, are interested in multiple things: music, dance, literature, politics etc. Photography can be a feature of, or an inspiration for, anything - be it cooking, a film, comedy and so on.

This year, I am also directing a residency of musicians, filmmakers, photographers and archivists for an event from 3-5 April at The John Smedley textile factory to create a live music performance to a new photo film, The Developer. Another project this year is new work by two digital artists, Brendan Randall and Brendan Oliver who have collaborated with a break-dancer to create an interactive zoetrope.

The public will be invited to participate [at the FORMAT13 venue The Chocolate Factory] in creating short, animated Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs) for the installation and to share of themselves break-dancing to a song related to the FORMAT13 theme.

LH: FORMAT Patron Brian Griffin said, ahead of FORMAT 11, that the UK is “way down the pecking order” in the photography world. What is your view on photography in the UK today?

LC: I think there is a thriving scene right now with much more activity than in the last 10 years.

There are many fantastic photographers, collectives, institutions, independent initiatives, international collaborations and archives based in the UK. I recently co-authored a book with Big City Press, Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia and the UK, featuring 35

photographers, and included an exhibition that we toured internationally. Later this year, I am curating Dong Gang International Photography Festival in South Korea with a focus on British photography.

There is a very rich history of photography in the UK and many brilliant established photographers and there are a lot of new practitioners breaking through.

LH: The theme of International Women’s Day 2013 is The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum.

With this in mind, can you comment on whether this discussion is relevant to you in your role today?

LC: In my job I work as an individual and, fortunately, I am able to work without being continually conscious of my gender. I am not biased, either way, in my programming.

My personal agenda is to be fair; to be passionate about photography, culture and life in all its forms; to support the development of the media; and to work with the best in the field.

There are thousands of diverse personalities that I encounter all over the world every year. People and power relations vary everywhere. I try, whenever possible, to fight and counter injustice - whether it is gender, age, race etc. There are so many potential prejudices and barriers, both apparent and subtle. In my work, there are many issues to deal with beyond gender relations.

a work placement. After graduating in 1999, I worked in the picture industry, before joining the gallery as Picture Librarian in 2002. Working in image licensing for seven years, I gained additional experience volunteering, including working on the exhibition, Gay Icons (2009).

From 2008-10, I studied for a MA in Museum Studies. This invaluable experience where theory informed my practice was a turning point and contributed to my appointment as Assistant Curator of Photographs in 2009.

LH: How have you seen the photographic programme develop over the past decade?

Interview with Helen Trompeteler.

HT: The gallery has continued its long-established series of major exhibitions celebrating master portrait photographers and developed a diverse displays programme. Commissions have included series by photographers including Tessa Traeger (2000), Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (2005), Don McCullin (2006) to our largest project, The Road to 2012 (2009-12), with Brian Griffin, Bettina von Zwehl, Emma Hardy, Finlay MacKay, Anderson & Low, Jillian Edelstein and Nadav Kander. Photography remains an integral part of our Learning, Loans and National Programmes activities. Recent photographic partnerships include Real and Imagined Lives at M Shed museum in Bristol (2012), and the exhibition Comedians that toured five regional venues over the past three years.

LH: I am interested to learn more about your role as curator. What has it been like to work on the first major museum retrospective of Man Ray’s photographic portraits?

LH: As a curator working within the context of a national museum, what are your thoughts on the new wave of independent photography galleries in the UK?

Helen Trompeteler (HT): As the associate curator on ‘Man Ray Portraits’, I worked alongside the exhibition curator Terence Pepper on all aspects of the project since late 2010. My responsibilities included contributing to the image selection, identifying the best vintage prints in international collections, producing exhibition and catalogue text and overseeing the design and installation process with colleagues. It has been a great privilege to work on this landmark exhibition.

HT: Independent galleries are vital to photography in the UK, as is the ongoing dialogue between such organisations and national museums.

The exhibitions programmes of national museums are often committed up to five years ahead, so independent galleries have flexibility in programming which can sometimes be harder to achieve in national museums.

LH: What have you taken away from this experience?

HT: I am proud that with the great support of lenders, we have been able to introduce visitors to unseen, or less familiar, later works by Man Ray. The relationships I have developed with the photographer’s estate, international colleagues, collectors and academics are of great importance to me, personally and professionally. I am especially fond of discoveries made during a research trip in 2012 that included tracing Man Ray’s work for Harper’s Bazaar. On a daily basis, I am enjoying talking to visitors and engaging in debates about Man Ray’s legacy.

LH: Could you tell us about how you have got to where you are today?

HT: My connection with the National Portrait Gallery began, aged sixteen, when I arranged

LH: The theme of International Women’s Day 2013 is The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum. With this in mind, can you comment on whether this discussion is relevant to you in your role today?

HT: This discussion greatly informs my role.

A central aim is discovering and promoting the work of contemporary women photographers through exhibition, interpretation and discussion.

From a historical perspective, the role of female pioneers of the medium during the 19th and 20th centuries has often been less documented.

Helping to reassess and restore the reputation of such artists drives my work. For example, in 2010 I curated the Format Photography Agency 19832003 display, and recent essays have included a piece on the life and work of modernist photographer, Lucia Moholy.

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PHOTO STORY // Mother Volga Chloe Dewe Mathews

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“Mother Volga” remains a strong symbol in contemporary Russia: a source of life, sustenance and redemption.

The city of Astrakhan sits on its delta, where the river ends its long journey from Northern Russia and flows into the Caspian Sea. Each year, Orthodox believers celebrate the feast of the Epiphany, remembering the baptism of Jesus by bathing in the holy river. They believe the blessed Volga will purify them, washing away the sins of the previous year and offering protection against future illnesses.

Year round, the river’s elemental power is acknowledged in other ways. Wealthy Russians travel to Astrakhan to take advantage of the delta’s rich wildlife. The many hunting and fishing lodges on the delta actively encourage manifestations of machismo: Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev go there on “bonding trips”, and highly-publicized competitive events yield lucrative prizes, reinforcing the still-powerful idea of the ultra-strong Russian male.

Alongside this, less-affluent locals still subsist by fishing, and cut holes in the thick ice to safeguard their livelihoods throughout the winter. In Soviet times, the government harnessed the Volga’s power for its ambitious hydroelectric infrastructure, damaging the ecosystem and threatening the native sturgeon. Post USSR, it is industrial pollution from oil and gas that most threatens the environment; vast quantities of chemical and biological pollutants pour into the river daily.

The Volga delta is the last stage of the great river’s journey from the mountains to the sea. Mother Volga continues to reflect the country’s enduring and powerful spirit, as well as its turbulent past and uncertain future.

Chloe Dewe Mathews After a degree in Fine Art at Oxford University, Chloe worked in the feature film industry for four years. Though exciting, she questioned its extravagance and wanted to work on something quieter, more economical, where there was room for spontaneity and intimacy with her subject.

Since dedicating herself to photography, her subject matter has been diverse, from Uzbek gravediggers on the Caspian coast, to Hasidic Jews on holiday in Wales. In 2010 she hitchhiked from China back to Britain, which became a recce for a lifetime’s work ahead.

Chloe has recently been awarded the BJP International Photography Award, the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award and the Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award by the Magenta Foundation. In 2011 she became the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary called Picturing Britain, which followed her long-term project on the banger racing sub-culture.

Her work has been exhibited in London, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Toronto and published in magazines including The New York Times, the Saturday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Huck, IL Italy, Dazed and Confused and Harpers Bazaar.

Mother Volga’ is a chapter from the long term project CASPIAN. www.chloedewemathews.com

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ARTICLE // Does the Camera Always Lie? Lou Miller

‘To photograph is to confer importance’ – Susan Sontag

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From a collection of colourful photographs, a group of alien faces stare unflinchingly out at the viewer.

Or so we would imagine. Each face has been distorted, transformed by Alma Haser’s ‘Cosmic Surgery’. To view the series as a whole is an unsettling experience; we see uncanny masks where human features would normally be. It is this notion of masking and the associated complexities of the pose that are innovatively explored within Alma Haser’s photographs.

The series ‘Cosmic Surgery’ is, simultaneously, a multi-faceted portrait series and a conceptual discourse reflecting upon the craft of image making. In her playful and experimental style, Haser questions the ways we read photographic images and jolts us into reconsidering traditional assumptions regarding the place of identity within portraiture.

The creation of ‘Cosmic Surgery’ contains a meditative element. Indeed, the nature of Haser’s intervention is gentle and considered. Whilst the themes explored within her series display great depth, her approach is playful, almost humorous.

The work itself hints at an experimental exploration into the boundaries of image making as a broad and adaptive craft, yet the title suggests a series that is at odds with the brutality of the surgical reference. Whilst the faces seem otherworldly and futuristic, the lines of Haser’s surgery have been created using traditional origami techniques; her delicate touch displays a considered reflection upon the nature of the medium.

The masking of the face with an abstract construct of itself approaches the image as simulacra – the ways in which the photograph flattens and merges

dimensions, and tricks the eye into accepting a subjective viewpoint as truth.

The paper construction obscures the features from which we would ordinarily determine meaning, and substitutes geometrically repetitive patterns in which the individual’s own eyes, lips and noses become disquieting forms.

Our natural instinct to anchor the features within normative signifiers of type, nature or essence battles with a visual conundrum. The features are reduced to shapes and colours; the form of which seems to move freely, back and forth, within the photographic plane.

Haser’s images blur the conventional boundaries of the photographic portrait, combining photography and origami to create a series of three-dimensional sculptures situated within the two-dimensional photographic plane.

In combining mediums and dimensions, the viewer is forced to reconsider traditional readings of the portrait as an authentic site of human essence.

In effect, ‘Cosmic Surgery’ is process laid bare.

Haser completes each image in three distinct stages. Firstly, she photographs her subject.

She then prints multiple copies of the subject’s face and folds the print into a complicated origami construction. Finally, she places this three-dimensional ‘face’ onto the original print and then re-photographs the construction. In this way, Haser produces a type of still-life image. It is this conceptual focus that allows Haser to blend various ‘types’ of photography and demonstrate the myriad elements that can exist when an art practice and photography are merged within an image.

Paper provides an ephemeral service - we use it to make, to wrap, to hold, to set words and images in place. In the creation of origami the impermanence of paper is accepted and even celebrated. The value of the object is not the end function: it is process; it is creation and meditation for the sake in and of itself. In Haser’s hands, the paper becomes a physical manifestation of the metaphorical façade present within the posed image. Her use of the printed image to create the origami form highlights two important points in regard to form and nature. Firstly, and essentially, that a portrait is a construction, and secondly, that form dictates the reception of the image. Haser’s paper constructions are, fundamentally, a series of masks or metaphorical poses. Just as no two folds create the same mask, so each pose results in a different reading of the portrait.

Haser’s methodology disrupts the ways in which we project our personal agendas onto images.

It is essential to remember that the reading of all images is site-specific, and, where that site relates specifically to the body, the assumption will be that the photograph reveals something intimate and essential about the human condition.

But why should this be the case? If we turn to the democratisation of the portrait in the early twentieth century, the widespread availability of photographic services, coupled with the circulation of celebrity portraits, allowed ambitious individuals to record an aspirational version of their likeness for posterity by simply adopting a pose.(1) In mimicking specific poses, the sitter determines which of a range of signifiers he or she will present, so that, effectively, the sitter enters into a process of portrait-as-ritual. In this way, the pose reduces the interior subject to little more than an exterior mask, and in adopting the pose, the individual ‘dissolves in the medial image.’(2) Human nature dictates a singular determination to preserve the Self. To do this we must locate and register our being within our surroundings: we must be visible. Indeed, Kaja Silverman notes that, ‘ever since the inception of cave drawing, it has been via images that we see and are seen.’(3) To create an image is to both record and interpret our surroundings in relation to the Self. In masking the individual with an unrecognisable version of themselves, Haser acknowledges the contentious idea of authentic human presence within the realm of photographic portraiture.

Haser’s complex and literal merging of traditional and contemporary forms demonstrates a unique approach to the medium of portraiture. The three-dimensional origami creation effectively allows Haser to open up and explore the liminal space within the photographic plane. In doing so, she neatly demonstrates a basic juxtaposition inherent within photography: that our ‘immortal’ image has been fixed upon a disposable medium.

The portrait confirms, most simply, that ‘I exist’.

In her role as creator, manufacturer, and manipulator, Alma Haser highlights the tacit relationship between photographer, sitter and viewer, and draws the viewer’s attention to the role of construction within her layered compositions. Untouched by digital trickery, Haser’s work explores the craft of photography, revealing layers, mirrors and optical illusions within her deconstruction of the photographas-process. ‘Cosmic Surgery’ communicates a disconnect between a human desire for self-knowledge and an objective reality and questions the desire to believe that we may be preserved within the temporal stronghold of the image.

Haser’s practice allows the artist to become a storyteller and to tease out the various narratives that collide and merge within the photographic plane. By literally de-facing her subjects, Haser disrupts our instinctive and habitual modes of reading the portrait, and forces us to note and question the signifiers present within the face of

the sitter. In acknowledging the barrier between the viewer and the sitter, we are reminded that we simultaneously, ‘show ourselves in a pose, but we also hide behind a pose’.(4) That is, we essentially hide behind a pre-prescribed version of the Self. By manipulating the sitter’s face, Haser reveals a façade; one that is often construed as key to portraiture, and, in doing so, she forces us to challenge the notion that the portrait is a testament to personal identity.

1 // Susanne Holschbach, ‘The Pose: Its Troubles and Pleasures’ in Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography, Ute Eskildsen, Ed. Tate Publishing: London, 2008, p.172. See this essay for an in-depth reading of the historical development of the pose and its associated ramifications within the medium of portraiture.

2 // Susanne Holschbach, Ibid, p.175.

3 // Kaja Silverman quoted in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, Ellen T. Armour and Susan M.St.Ville, Eds., Columbia University Press: New York and Chichester, West Sussex, 2006, p.236 4 // Susanne Holschbach, Ibid, p.173

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PHOTO STORY // Cosmic Surgery Alma Haser

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Since leaving University in 2010, Alma has been working on self-portraits, being her own willing and available model. More recently she has started taking portraits of other people and is interested in making work that has a disquieting or disconcerting resonance.

Alma has always made things with her hands and now tries to find ways to combine her fine art background with photography. She has used origami in the past as props in her photographs, but in this series ‘Cosmic Surgery’ the origami has become an integral part of the final image.

The series has three distinct stages. Firstly Alma photographs her sitter, then prints multiple images of the subjects face and folds them into a complicated origami modular construction, which then gets placed back onto the original face of the portrait. Finally the whole thing is re-photographed.

Origami is very meditative, you can get lost in the world of folding for hours. It is also extremely delicate and fragile, so by giving each geometric paper shape somewhere to sit within the final image, the origami has been given a backbone.

There is something quite alien about the manipulated faces, as if they belong to some futuristic next generation. In these portraits the children become uncanny, while their parents are seen in a more familiar moment.

With the simple act of folding an image Alma can transform each face and make a sort of flattened sculpture. By de-facing her models she has made their portraits into her own creations.

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Photo Captions

Alma Haser

1 // Katie

Alma Haser graduated in 2010, completing her BA (Hons) in Photography in Art Practice at Nottingham Trent University.

2 // Cassie 3 // Lottie 4 // Helen 5 // Lilly & Anastasia 6 // Alexandra 7 // Tillly & Johnny 8 // Luna

Bilingual in English and German, she comes from a family steeped in arts and the creative industries, both in the UK and in Europe. Aged 13, she accompanied her mother and younger brother on a round-the-world trip, culminating in a six-month stay on the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

Travel continues to be one of her great passions.

After exploring with self-portraiture, and then moving to London Alma started to create a strong body of portraits which have got her a lot of recognition. Chosen by the British Journal of Photography as one of the four best graduates of 2010, her work has featured in 10 exhibitions internationally. Her Cosmic Surgery series received third place peoples choice award at the Foto8 Summer Show 2012 and most recently ‘The Ventriloquist,’ a portrait of two friends, was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London. www.haser.org // @AlmaHaser

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Maja Daniels Maja Daniels is a Swedish independent photographer currently based in London, UK. Having studied journalism, photography and sociology, her work focuses on social documentary and portraiture with an emphasis on human relations in a western, contemporary environment.

By using sociology as a frame of research and approach to her photographic work, she finds it a successful combination when trying to focus on the interaction between man and society.

Dividing her time between long-term documentary projects and commercial work, she is regularly commissioned by the weekly and monthly press as well as humanitarian organisations and cultural institutions. She also collaborates with social scientists in academic projects, using photography as a tool within sociological and cultural research. www.majadaniels.com Afshin Dehkordi Afshin Dehkordi is a co-founder of studioSTRIKE, an arts venue in London, in 2012 he worked as Artistic Consultant to the Brighton Photo Fringe and Festival Director of Bread & Roses Centennial for which he conceived, produced and delivered a multi-venue festival incorporating photography, performance art and film and supported by Film London, Arts Council England and the British Film Institute.

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Between major projects Afshin is a visiting lecturer in documentary photography, journalism and film at University of the Creative Arts, and has produced and presented for the BBC across radio and TV. He is also a practising artist and writer who works internationally across a number photographic and lens-based genres. www.studiostrike.com // @AfshinDehkordi Miranda Gavin Miranda Gavin is a freelance writer, photographer and educator. She is Deputy and Online Editor for the bimonthly contemporary photography magazine Hotshoe International, runs its blog (hotshoeblog.wordpress.com), and is a regular contributor to other photography publications in the UK and abroad. She judges photography competitions, does portfolio reviews and regularly delivers and chairs photography-related talks.

In 2010, she co-founded Tri-pod (www.tri-pod. co.uk) with Wendy Pye, a creative initiative that supports lens-based artists with personal projects in progress. Miranda has worked as a teacher and a photography trainer (PhotoVoice) and has a degree in Photography, Film & Video (University of Westminster) and a Master of Research in Humanities and Cultural Studies (London Consortium, University of London). She loves sunshine and creativity. // @mirandagavin

Louise Hobson Louise Hobson is a Cardiff based photographer and arts assistant. She has interned for Ffotogallery, the national development agency for photography and lens-based media in Wales and is currently working as a photographer’s assistant for an upcoming touring exhibition.

Areas of particular interest include curatorial practice and participation and engagement in the visual arts. www.louisehobson.co.uk // @louisedhobson

Lou Miller Lou Miller joined the Miniclick team in 2012, and now co-curates the Miniclick talks and events alongside Director Jim Stephenson. Lou graduated from Sussex University with an Art History MA in 2010, and now works as a freelance writer and arts administrator. Lou is also an intern at GOST Books, a photography and visual arts publishers founded by Gordon MacDonald and Stuart Smith. www.miniclick.co.uk // @loumiller9

Eleanor O’Kane

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As a former Deputy Editor of Professional Photographer magazine Eleanor put questions to new and emerging image-makers as well as legends such as Harry Benson and Ian Berry before working as Social Media Editor for Hungry Eye magazine where she explored how technology, and social media in particular, enables imagemakers to connect, create and flourish.

While admitting the digital landscape makes it easier to create and collaborate, she is still a huge fan of ink and paper. Now a freelance writer, Eleanor writes about travel, design, image-making and lifestyle. www.eleanorokane.com // @eleanorokane Joy Stacey Joy Stacey is a Brighton based photographer currently studying her Photography MA at the University of Brighton. Her work examines visual representations of political subjects. // @joystacey_

Jim Stephenson Jim Stephenson is an architectural photographer and film maker based in Brighton, working internationally. His work has featured in publications such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and The New York Times.

Although his first passion is architecture, in addition to his professional practice Stephenson founded the Miniclick Photography Talks in September 2010 as a platform for photographers to present their work and as a vehicle to create discussion. www.miniclick.co.uk // @clickclickjim Miniclick The Miniclick Photography Talks are a series of monthly, free photography and film-making events based in Brighton, UK. Founded by Jim Stephenson, under the curatorship of Lou Miller and Jim, and now working with Jack Latham and Kristina S채lgvik, they have been running for over two years. In this time they have worked with some of the finest photographers from the UK and further afield to put on talks, panel discussions, workshops, Pecha Kucha nights and film screenings. www.miniclick.co.uk // @miniclicktalks

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SJP

Illustrations: Adam Campbell www.beardless.co.uk Design: Stanley James Press www.stanleyjamespress.com // @iamstanleyjames With support from MPB Photographic www.mpbphotographic.co.uk // @mpbphotographic

Editor: Miranda Gavin Sub-Editor: Lou Miller Commissioning Editor: Jim Stephenson

Natasha Caruana Maja Daniels Afshin Dehkordi Chloe Dewe Mathews Miranda Gavin Maria Gruzdeva Alma Haser Louise Hobson Jo Metson Scott Lou Miller Eleanor O’Kane Laura Pannack Agata Pietron Joy Stacey Jim Stephenson Abbie Trayler-Smith