Publication#2

Miniclic k

P U B L I C AT I O N # T W O

Summer 2013

CONTENTS

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Editor’s Letter Intro Jen Davis // Self Portraits Jen Davis Interview Tim Andrews // Over The Hill Maja Daniels Jim Mortram // Small Town Inertia Jim Mortram Interview Keith Medley // Double Take Eleanor O’Kane Julia Fullerton-Batten // Unadorned Portrait Salon in Conversation Jim Naughten // Re-Enactors Alis Oldfield Charles Fréger // Wilder Mann Joanna Cresswell MacDonaldStrand // The Beachers Contributors

EDITOR’S LETTER // Miranda Gavin

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‘The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.’

- Henri Cartier Bresson Portraiture is one of the most ubiquitous of photographic genres and one of the most diverse.

For the second Miniclick publication, work by photographers using portraiture is accompanied by texts exploring and reflecting on different aspects of the genre. The variety of photographs showcased in Publication #2 give insights into some of the diverse ways in which contemporary photographers approach and represent their subjects. When it comes to creating photographic portraits of a subject, there is no one-size-fits-all.

Portraits can be as varied as the sitters ranging from staged and constructed images, using collage or applied techniques, to environmental portraiture. In the culture of photography, it is portraiture that accompanies us throughout our lives from birth to death, and marks many of the celebratory milestones in people’s lives.

A portrait in general is defined as a considered artistic representation of a person, often showing the head and shoulders, with an emphasis on the face and expression. Yet even when the sitter’s face is absent - such as when a subject has his or her back to the camera - the resulting photograph is still regarded by some, to be a portrait. Throughout the history of the medium, photographers have composed portraits of people from all walks of life for all sorts of reasons, and it is a commonly-held view that it is this intent that separates portraiture from snapshot images. For purists, passport photos and mug shots fall outside this remit. However, the validity of such rigid boundaries has been called into question, especially in contemporary photography.

Seemingly one of the most straightforward of genres, portraiture is also one of the most complex. For some, it is about surface and conveying ‘likeness’ to the sitter; for others, it is about depth and interpreting the internal and emotional worlds. A quick search on YouTube turns up a three-minute film in which artists, curators and National Portrait Gallery staff try to describe what a portrait is - only to find that it is “a surprisingly difficult question to answer”. It is also difficult to take an effective portrait, as Cartier Bresson remarks. Today, with the pushing of boundaries and the tweaking of realities, instead of asking the usual question: what is a portrait? It may be helpful to ask: what isn’t a portrait?

Miranda Gavin

INTRODUCTION //

When we started putting together Publication #1, releasing it in March earlier this year, it was an experiment.

Somehow we’d gotten together the means to produce a print run of almost 200 and we’d bought in some hugely talented people to contribute images and written content for it.

The issue was themed “Women in Focus” and we were joined by Miranda Gavin as Editor.

We planned a series of events throughout March on the same theme, and launched the Publication on 28th March. By the beginning of May, and much to our relief, we’d sold out of the magazine and could confidently start planning for Publication #2.

So, first off, thank you to everyone who contributed to, bought and supported Publication #1, allowing us to produce what you hold in your hands now!

For this edition we wanted to explore what it means to reach out, to take a photograph of another human being, or to have that photograph taken. We wanted to explore the different ways that people record, document and preserve, their reasons for doing so, and the ways in which we, the viewer, read these documents once they have been committed to photographic paper.

The theme for Publication #2 is “Portraiture”.

As we researched the topic, we quickly discovered that portraiture is a huge and unwieldily sub-genre within photography.

It covers everything from self-portraiture, studio, documentary, worlds of fantasy, a search for the truth and always a reflection of both photographer and subject. Beyond that, we also looked at projects like James Reynold’s & Amnesty Internationals “Last Meals of Executed Innocent Men” as we searched for the boundaries to define portraiture. Does portraiture only extend to photographs of people’s faces? Can a series of objects, with sufficient personal significance, be a portrait? Where do we stop? How much can we blur the lines from sub-genre to sub-genre?

As with Publication #1,and with Miniclick generally, the plan for #2 is not simply to produce a vanity project, something pretty we can show to our friends (although it is pretty, and we do show our friends). We are looking to provide a platform for these

discussions to happen, through both the physical copy of this edition and the events we run throughout the year.

We’re extremely grateful to all those who have contributed their images, words, time and ideas to Miniclick. We hope that you enjoy this Publication, that it inspires you and, most importantly, gets you talking Welcome to Publication #2!

Lou Miller & Jim Stephenson

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PHOTO STORY // Self-Portraits Jen Davis

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“In this body of work, I deal with the insecurities associated with my body image and the direct correlation between self-perception and the way one is perceived by others. Photography is the medium that I use to tell my story through life, an outlet for revealing my struggles and thoughts in regards to the society in which we live. A society that dictates beauty based on ones physical appearance.

“In my photographs I aim to raise questions regarding beauty, desire, body image, and identity through a focused observation of my personal story. I have built a relationship between the camera and myself where I transform the act of taking a photograph into a performance for the camera. My work is partially based on personal experiences that I have re-constructed into a photograph, and the other part consists of made up fantasies of what I imagine a physical relationship to be regarding intimacy, love and desire.

“Through the act of photographing I invite the viewer into my private life, exploring the vulnerabilities that I carry associated with a life-long struggle with my body, feelings of isolation, the battle to recognise beauty, and quest for intimacy.”

Images and Words Courtesy of the artist and Lee Marks Fine Art.

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Photo Captions

Jen Davis

1 // Pressure Point

b. 1978, Akron, Ohio

2 // Untitled No. 55

Jen Davis is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

For the past eleven years she has been working on a series of Self-Portraits dealing with issues regarding beauty, identity, and body image.

She has also been exploring men, as a subject and is interested in investigating the idea of relationships, both physical and psychological, with the camera. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2008, and her BA from Columbia College Chicago in 2002.

3 // Pantyhose 4 // Untitled No. 39 5 // Untitled No. 21 6 // Aldo and I 7 // Untitled No. 54

Jen is represented by Lee Marks Fine Art. www.jendavisphoto.com // @jenedavisphoto

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INTERVIEW // Miniclick’s Lou Miller and Jim Stephenson talk to Jen Davis about portraiture and self-portraiture

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Miniclick (MC): We read a really interesting quote of yours that got us thinking about the psychological side of your work. You were talking about a photograph you took on the beach, and you said of that moment: “I wanted to make a picture to see what it felt like”. Was that the starting point; the point where you had to step back and put a barrier there; to see what you were experiencing?

Jen Davis (JD): Yes, I think that was an entry point into the work when I didn’t really have a way of talking: I didn’t have a voice to express what I was feeling emotionally. If pictures of my body were brought up, or talked about, I would completely break down or shut down; I wasn’t even able to handle being accountable for it in a way.

But with a camera, I was able to explore these things. For the first time I could start to actually ask these questions of myself within the context of a society where there’s this umbrella of beauty, and what is perceived as the ideal.

There was a feeling that I never was part of that society, so I began a challenging quest of looking at myself. You can look in a mirror and you can trick it almost, so you look a certain way, but I felt that, with the camera, there was no lying; what it recorded and what it saw was the truth to me. In the beginning I was really naïve: I was just standing in front of this machine, letting in light and recording myself in this innocent way.

MC: Did you intend to approach yourself in a scientific documentary way?

JD: I don’t think that was ever something I thought of - it was just an outlet, a way to start having a voice. I was really surprised by what I saw in that picture on the beach. I was on vacation so I didn’t see it right away, but a week later I had the film

processed, and I was surprised by how real it felt; how I was able to isolate this moment in time - none of my work prior to that had the same kind of feel to it. Even though it was staged, it was this slice of life, frozen in this one moment that I felt and that I experienced. The intense scrutiny that I was putting myself under was something that I’d never really done before. Being that uncomfortable, being at the beach with friends in bikinis and I had all these layers on; I was just really covered in a sense, so there was tension, there was something really uncomfortable about being in that situation and the camera entered into that.

MC: Did photography come first, or was it the desire to look at yourself in more depth, to analyse yourself that made you turn to the camera?

JD: I think that came with the camera, absolutely, because it was my first way of talking: the camera freed me and empowered me in a way. It allowed me to try and find answers, to try to get access to myself and to other people that I’ve photographed.

This machine gives me entitlement, in a way, or a certain power that I wouldn’t ordinarily have. With self-portraits, there’s a person that I’m projecting in the work; a personal private side that I don’t project into the world, that I didn’t even really know existed. With the camera, with these setups, I was exploring myself and realising that this interior self was unfolding.

MC: You described the relationship between you and the camera as a performance. It seems you’re psychologically finding this realness through acting out fantasties and sharing desires. The images are quite raw and emotionally charged, often with a voyeuristic element – was it challenging to be that open?

JD: I feel like there’s a balance between truth and fantasy where, in every photograph that I’ve made over the 12 years, I remember how everything felt: my skin, the person that’s with me, my emotions. Voyeuristically, in a way, I’m observing myself: this third person is me, and there’s no one else that has access to that; there’s no one else in the room unless they’re in the photograph with me.

There was never a direct connection with the viewer; my gaze was always somewhere else until the fantasy work started. There’s one frame where I was looking right at the lens and I had never done that before. I didn’t realise this at the time, and I didn’t realise it straight afterwards.

Looking at the image after a year had passed, I realised that I just wanted to see what it would feel like to be held. It was so simple. There was no sexual tension, no chemistry; the man was a prop, almost. His identity was masked. But later, when I looked at it as the viewer would, I realised I wanted to be desired. This was the first time desire ever entered into my work in such a forward way, and that desire became part of the viewer’s experience. The camera became part of this relationship along with the surrogate men: they became part of the story, this exploration of desire and desiring.

MC: Does that confrontational gaze take you by surprise?

JD: Definitely, in every frame. I think the expression and the gaze were filled with this longing, an empathy towards something I didn’t know or didn’t understand, and I was asking for this in return from the viewer.

MC: How is that connection affected when you take portraits of other people?

JD: When I started to photograph other people it felt really good to connect with another person.

I wanted to figure out how to explore these relationships, these exchanges under the umbrella of desire. But this is still a kind of performance; I need to entice, to seduce to get the sitter to do what I want. They give their trust to you. It’s really exciting to build that relationship with someone.

When I’m shooting them, it’s like the other side of desire: my desire, their desire to be looked at too, I think.

For me, if something’s emotionally painful, there’s this peaceful therapeutic process; I’m releasing something in myself, even if it’s something simple like a feeling or a look. With myself there’s a kind of duality: a balance between something that’s really fragile, but also this need to experience my sense of self, a sexual self, these questions of beauty.

As a photographer, I’m using the palette to make something as beautiful as possible within the frame: using light and colour to have a sensitivity to my place in the world, how I feel I’m perceived, and to look at something that’s not conventionally seen as beautiful. With these simple hints of light, I’m able to seduce the viewer in a way. That’s my vehicle; that’s the only way that I’m able to search for this kind of relationship with myself and others.

MC: It seems there are points where you’re struggling, emotionally, and the camera helps you find resolution, yet there are other points where it’s a distraction. How does your relationship with the camera change at various points?

JD: Over time there has been an important evolution, but now being around the images so much has desensitised me in a way. Back in 2011 I was making prints in the darkroom that were 20 by 24 inches – I was seeing myself 100% magnified. It was uncomfortable because I‘d never had that relationship with myself before.

My assistants and people were talking technically about me, as the work, and I was so embarrassed and ashamed. I think now, looking back, I didn’t even know my body, it wasn’t something I was ever aware of really, until I started losing weight and feeling different and photographing that process too. Because I was too uncomfortable to deal with it at that point, I was able to suppress it, to photograph it and learn from it. That experience alone, I think, was the changing point for me.

It allowed me to look at it all together and just be ok. I’ve allowed myself to be vulnerable for the camera, but not in the world, for myself or with a partner. That outlet was only through photography. I just realised: I want to know what it feels like to live in a smaller body, to live in a world that I don’t know. I’ve done so much in ten years but why have I never tried to really change?

Being in the dark room for a month, really looking at myself under a microscope, that made me realise that things had to change, or I wanted to change.

MC: It sounds like a cathartic process, how do you feel about showing something so vulnerable?

JD: Discovering my own vulnerability, in a way, is tied to intimacy and desire: those are the three things that I feel are intertwined. Something I think is important about the work, or maybe its best attribute for me, is people being able to accept it: people being able to look at this body, at this person, and empathise with them, to put themselves into the narrative. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about one self: my body, my size - it can cross over to other people who have body image issues.

Also, it doesn’t necessarily have to have to be about obesity; people can relate to it because of the implication of someone being vulnerable, or allowing themselves to be.

MC: Do you think you’ll continue to document yourself indefinitely, or do you think there will be a point where you’ll think, “this is finished”?

JD: When there’s an important moment in my life, I’ll document it, but there are also periods where I’m not wanting to look at myself – sometimes I want to experience life, and catch up on the emotional side too.

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PHOTO STORY // Over The Hill Tim Andrews

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In 2005 Tim Andrews was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He left his job as a solicitor and turned himself into a living art project. Over the past six years he has been photographed by 250 different photographers in one of the most comprehensive and moving portraiture projects of recent years.

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Photo Captions

Tim Andrews

1 // Harry Borden “Invisible”

“I was born in London in 1951 but my father, who was a multitalented musician who played with swing and jazz bands, died in 1953, leaving my mother, a beautiful ex-dancer aged 34, with five children under the age of eight. I worked hard at school and passed my exams and eventuallly trained as a lawyer. I worked as a lawyer for 29 years eventually owning my own firm with five other partners. However, working in the law was not really my thing – I was always artistic and really wanted to be an actor – so when I was 39, I trained at drama school in the evenings.

Eventually, I ended up performing one man plays and was seen by a theatrical agent who put me on her books, but I realised that I had to choose between acting professionally and the the law.

The law won: I needed the guaranteed income for the mortgage, school fees and so on, so I acted whenever I could on a semi-professional basis.

2 // Maja Daniels “My Charlie Chaplin” 3 // Spencer Murphy “Lucky Kind” 4 // Luca Sage “All or Nothing” 5 // Chris Floyd “This is Tim” 6 // Alma Haser “My Gulliver Moment” 7 // Astrid Schulz “Wanted!”

8 // Alicia Clarke “Man with Parkinsons...

Dancing” 9 // Brian David Stevens “Freeze” 10 // Mattia Maestri “Falling”

In 2005, I discovered I had Parkinson’s disease and had to stop working in June 2006. Since then I have found my freedom. I have been writing a lot, having my photograph taken by wonderfully interesting and talented people, and going to the cinema which is my greatest love apart from watching cricket. l do not regard my modelling as akin to acting. ln the photos you see the real me – many sides of the same person – whereas when l was acting l was pretending to be someone else.

Where there is an overlap, perhaps, is that when I acted, l became that other person and felt that l could do anything on stage. In the same way, when I am in front of the camera, l tell the photographers that l am willing to do anything.

I used to spend my days wrapped in a suit, imprisoned in an office. Now I spend my days feeling free and I am very, very happy.” www.timandrewsoverthehill.blogspot.co.uk // @TJRANDREWS

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ARTICLE // Looking at Tim Andrews’ ‘Over the Hill’ Project Through the Spectrum of Affect Theory Maja Daniels

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Affect Theory attempts to focus on how we communicate beyond words. This is done through the consideration of the various embodied, visceral forces and intensities that will lead to emotion but that are more instantaneous and often unconscious. According to Melissa Gregg and Gregory J Seigworth in The Affect Theory Reader (2010), affect can drive us toward movement, thought, new encounters and ever-changing forms of relation. Affect theory has thus come to be concerned with what the visual does; how and why we react to images. However, due to a tendency to focus on moving and interactive images, very little of Affect Theory focuses on photography.

Does this mean that photography should be considered a less “affective” medium? The scepticism towards the photographic medium is not new. A long tradition within philosophy separates the still and the moving image. Martin Jay commented in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, how Henri Bergson set the tone related to a rejection of the snapshot’s violent interruption of the flow of a temporal duration. Following Bergson, Roland Barthes (Barthes 1980 in Jay 1994) argued that the seeking gaze produces anxiety. As we look at a photograph, we take note of someone havingbeen-there and, as we do, we mourn the loss of that time. Barthes argued that the photograph contains an implicit trauma, that it is violent because it “fills the sight by force and because it cannot be refused or transformed”. For Barthes, the camera represents an evil eye that transforms a subject into object.

Mike Featherstone’s article, ‘Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture’ (2010), tries to engage with the complex relationships between body, image and affect. Featherstone is interested

in the relationship between body and image, and how we experience our ‘bodyimage’ (also referred to as our ‘mirror-image’). The ‘body-image’, Featherstone writes, is the mental image that we have of our own body as it appears to others. In the absence of the mirror, photography becomes the main tool used to represent the body image and thus to imagine oneself. Within consumer culture, the body operates as an object of which we have a clear image. This image is, according to Featherstone, “a static image, in which the movement and unfolding of the body are captured as in a still photograph”. The body, however, cannot be reduced simply to a twodimensional ‘image’; it is the physical part of a lived entity that is diverse and undetermined.

Featherstone thus suggests that we need to take the moving body into account, as it is involved with a complex set of relations to the spaces around it. It is within the moving body that the affective body-without-image can be found.

When thinking about the role of photography and affect, Tim Andrews’ project Over the Hill is an interesting example. In 2005, Tim Andrews was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Soon after, he left his job as a solicitor and, in 2007, embarked upon a photographic project that has become a fascinating and engaging archive of the work of over 240 photographers. As a long time lover of photography, Tim would contact various photographers and ask them to take his portrait. He does not give any guidelines to the photographers; he lends himself to whatever vision they propose, thus giving the photographer complete freedom to capture him in any way they wish, without restrictions or barriers.

For Tim, the project started out as a way to renegotiate himself, however, the project is not visually centred on the ‘Parkinson’s aspect’ of Tim, rather it is a space where he is allowed to be ‘just Tim’: an unbounded, freer version of himself. Since the specificity of the photographic medium is to ‘freeze the moment’, Tim often appears in the photographs without the visible presence of the disease. As Rankin said: “During the shoot, he was shaking a hell of a lot, but from seeing the photograph you would never know he had Parkinson’s – the photograph has the power to make him still again.” It may seem ironic that the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, a condition that ultimately obstructs mobility, is what inspired Tim to get his life moving.

Featherstone argues that, within the photograph, intensities are missing and that we must turn to moving images to connect with the lived, affective body. For Tim, however, it is within this fixed image that intensities can be found. This frozen moment in time allows him to reconnect with his sense of self without the dominating presence of his disease.

As the still image prevents him from shaking, photography allows for Tim to engage with his body beyond his condition. The process of being photographed makes him re-engage with life, it is the affective escape that keeps him going. It is the image, the photograph, that makes Tim feel.

This affective reaction to the still image blurs the boundaries between the concept of ‘body image’ and ‘body without image’. Tim says of a portrait taken by Mattia Maestri, “I loved the image and each time I look at it, I love it even more. Why is that? What is so special about it that affects me so much? I think it is all tied up with the relationship with the photographer. I had complete faith in Mattia that he would look after me and help me produce the shots he wanted. I became increasingly relaxed and confident that Mattia would arrive at the place that he had pre-planned with such care and expertise and that he would take me with him.” In Tim’s case, it is the static artifice of the photographic image that functions as an affective catalyst. These images, often humorous, often nude, provide an excess of information. There is also a strong sense of manic accumulation in the never-ending number of photographers that Tim chooses to invite to partake in the project.

In order to emphasize the problem of granting privileges to certain types of technologies as more important affective ‘catalysts’, Sarah Kember and Joana Zylinska refer to their notion of the ‘mediated self’ in Life after New Media (2012). Photography, they argue, is equally based on the spaces in between; we experience something that is made, not just something that happened. The things that we make also make us. Photography cuts the world into manageable, two-dimensional images, but there is always more to photography than the photographs already in place. The potential of photography includes all the photographs ‘not yet taken’, i.e. the cuts ‘not yet made’. Whilst constantly cutting and freezing, photography is continuously involved with time. Kember and Zylinska argue that photography has become “so ubiquitous that our sense of being is intrinsically connected with being photographed, and with making sense of the world around us through seeing it imaged”.

Furthermore, through photography’s multiple outlets that have rendered the medium so familiar to us, its physical two-dimensionality becomes a safe zone within which we dare to face the chaos of the world. Since photography has the capability, in all its various forms, to carve out new passageways in life and, since it can move us and make us move in various ways, Kember and Zylinska argue that we can talk about photography as vitality, or ‘lifeness’. Contrary to a film that has a beginning and an end, the

photographs that are part of Tim’s project exist within a space that is difficult to define. Tim’s expression through photography does not have to do with truth, documentation or with representation, but rather with that instinctive moment that draws us in, that makes us start pulling the images together, where we begin to feel a story emerge. And it is here, in these cuts, these gaps in our knowledge that the affect resides within the photographic medium.

For Tim, it appears as if the ‘photographic image’ functions as an affective catalyst. He is able to channel an affective response through the process of being photographed and through viewing and re-viewing the photographs. The process as a whole helps him to re-connect with his own body and to manage the physical and psychological changes he faces. Tim’s personal photographic expression is steeped in the understanding that to reveal and to share is a cathartic experience.

Through this project, Tim has taken self-portraiture to a new and very interesting place.

Keep up to date with Tim’s work here: http://timandrewsoverthehill.blogspot.co.uk/

Bibliography Featherstone, Mike. Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture. Body & Society. 2010.

193 - 221.

Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory J. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2010, Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994.

Kember, Sarah and Zylinska, Joanna. Life after New Media, Mediation as a Vital Process.

London: MIT Press. 2012.

Note Many thanks to Tim Andrews for the personal correspondence from which this article was able to take shape.

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PHOTO STORY // Small Town Inertia Jim Mortram

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Small Town Inertia is a long-form photographic essay looking at marginalised individuals in the rural community in which Jim Mortram lives. Here, we present a series of portraits selected from a number of the stories that make up Small Town Inertia. In order to see these images within the context of the stories, we urge you to visit Jim’s website and look out for the stories as quoted in the image captions.

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J A Motram

1 // From the Story “Market Town : David : Postcards from the Black”

J A Mortram is a documentary photographer and environmental portraitist based in East Anglia, United Kingdom. Jim’s work is centred on creating an expansive long-form photographic essay, Small Town Inertia, which explores the intimate and untold stories of marginalised individuals in the small rural community in which he lives.

2 // From the Story “Market Town : Simon & Kirsty : Living with Epilepsy” 3 & 4 // From the story “Market Town : Simon : Living With Epilepsy: Plans & Sufferance” 5 // From the Story “Market Town : David : Postcards from the Black” 6 // From the Story “Market Town : Tilney1 : Nor Crystal Tears” 7 & 8 // From the Story “Market Town : Tilney1 : Isolation”

His photography has received critical acclaim and has been published widely. www.smalltowninertia.co.uk // @JAMortram

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INTERVIEW // Miniclick founder Jim Stephenson talks to Jim Mortram about his long-form documentary approach to portraiture, and the ways in which these expressive portraits Geographical help to tell the stories of those location and financial means had a big hand in marginalised individuals the shape the series has taken. living within Jim’s local I can’t afford to travel the world, or even out of the county to shoot community (though I feel the ethos for the series

would work anywhere in the world), so I decided to base the series pretty much within a five kilometre radius from home. It’s ended up with me turning a very fractured relationship with my location into one far more sensitive to the area, its people, its lives and its stories.

Jim Stephenson (JS): How did you get started on Small Town Inertia – what are its origins?

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Jim Mortram (JM): I had an introduction to photography at an early age as a witness to my father who was always developing negatives and prints.

I can recall being a very young child the first time I saw the alchemy of image-making and saw a photograph appear upon a blank piece of paper from nothingness. It left a huge impression upon me; those early moments, sights, and scents stored to become flashbacks years later. Those internal photographs made a resurgence years later when I was at art school studying Fine Art. I became increasingly disillusioned with abstraction - a staple at the art school I was attending - and increasingly concerned with how I felt advertising was being used to manipulate many areas of culture.

I began to make more photographic images than paintings and spent more time watching documentaries in the library than painting.

Then my mother fell ill and I quit art school to return home and be her fulltime carer at home.

Life was put on pause for a number of years.

By chance, about four years ago I was loaned a camera. I knew instantly and instinctively that I would only want to pursue documentary and portraiture. The first series I undertook was with an elderly friend, W H. I documented his last weeks before he passed away. I realised that I was the last person to take a photograph with him and it had a huge impact upon me: it was a slap in the face and a signpost – and probably the biggest wake up call of my life. From then on, I knew exactly what I intended to do. Every day that’s followed has been a step closer to the simple goal of reflecting and documenting, recording and listening, to the lives of those around me.

JS: So it’s partly out of necessity that you photograph such a geographically small part of the country?

JM: Yes, but not just because of that.

JS: How are you approaching the people you work with then? Do you already know them?

JM: Initially it was difficult, inasmuch as I was coming personally from a place where I was quite lost and lacking in confidence - the only way I knew how to shoot anyone was by taking street portraits. I had to learn the hard way and fast, but photography really helped me: the passion to shoot was greater, far greater, than the ease of staying insular. I soon learned, instinctively, that as long as one is open, honest, and passionate, people very rarely say no when you ask to make a portrait. Dereham is a small town, so, now and then I’d bump into the people I had already made street portraits with. Very organically it grew from meeting people in the street, to shooting within people’s homes, to my current situation: with a network of people around me that I can call on if I have a project, a theme, or a story in my mind, and folk might ask around if they know somebody who might be interested.

JS: The portraits you take sit within the context of a larger body of work that is documentary in style.

You interview your subjects as well, which adds a very personal touch to it all. Were you finding that portraits weren’t showing the whole story and needed accompanying text?

JM: What a great question! A standalone photograph can tell a story, for sure, but I was adamant in my own mind that my own ego wouldn’t have a hand in these documentary shoots. I mean I could potentially never have taken that extra step and conducted interviews, simply written a few words myself and edited the series, or even single shots and portraits, but in my heart of hearts, personally speaking, I’ve always

found that this reduces the people within the images to mere subjects. I’m not interested in trading the generosity of heart and trust that people give to me and then turning them into art. I’m not interested in overtly stylising reality, or creating more suffering than there is, or more joy than there might be. I just point the camera at what’s happening in front of me. Obviously, I’m making decisions whilst shooting, compositional decisions - which I feel are instinctive - technical decisions regarding light and so on, but that’s where the exertion of my sense of vision ceases.

I’m not a big admirer of manufacturing emotion posthumously in the editing stage, nor am I a big admirer of not putting in the time and simply giving people a cursory glance and, most importantly, making a judgment. There’s already far, far too much of that in our society as it is. A lot of the stories I work on could be misinterpreted were they told with one image, especially one portrait. A story is always more than one chapter and I prefer a good novel to the tag line on an advert. Documentary, for me, is not about punch lines - it’s really about sharing and communicating.

When I began I was very aware that to really learn anything, at times, you just have to shut up and listen. I like my images to listen as much as they see. I wanted these moments that I was able to witness to really communicate with the audience what life is like for the people who are brave enough to share them at all.

JS: With that in mind, have you considered filming your subjects?

JM: Very much and there are plans to do so.

By the end of this year, I’ll have some short documentary films completed.

JS: I’m interested in whether you think that you have to maintain a distance from your subjects at all. With some of the stories you’re documenting there must be a temptation to put the camera down and help these people out?

JM: I’d been documenting David since he was blinded as a result of a freak bicycling accident almost three years ago. Before the accident robbed him of his sight (David is 100% blind with zero light perception), he was an enthusiastic collector of books and an avid reader. Now his rooms are filled with books gathering dust, their pages filled with adventures, lives, stories and descriptions of visions and vistas that David is now unable to experience.

I’d searched for months for such a piece of apparatus. Not only would the SARA scanner a machine that scans and ‘reads’ books back to the listener - give David the opportunity to experience, once again, the joys of reading using words to create sights and sensations within his own imagination - he’d also be able to re-integrate himself within the now of the everyday that many of us take for granted.

He will be able to read today’s newspaper and the mail delivered to his home. When you have no idea if the sun or moon is tall in the sky,

when you wake into a world that’s forever black, anything that enables a foothold into each day is more than mere entertainment; it’s a lifesaver, a life maker.

Mike Hartley the designer of my website (BigFlannel.com) tipped me off to a website in the US called HopeMob, a fee-free fundraising site, not for one’s own projects, but to raise money for causes. Using the stories and videos I’d been sharing on the Small Town Inertia blog, I put together a pitch which was accepted by HopeMob and went live. I’d estimated about 40 days to raise the $3,200 to buy the SARA scanner. However, using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, we raised the money in five days (and five pretty sleepless nights!).

It’s a great example of a positive symbiotic nature between story, photograph, and audience. I feel that we did something collectively, and that’s just amazing, amazing. Top of the tree, of course, is David himself for trusting me; for placing faith in me to make photographs with him and share his story with the wider world - very brave of him, very brave.

JS: Presumably, you remain in contact with the people you photograph afterwards? It’s not just one shoot and then you’re off?

JM: Yes. Shooting long-form documentary is the only way I can really work. Portraiture is a very unique discipline as you can generate a rapport in two minutes and get a genuine engagement, but it’s in stark contrast to longform work: everything evolves, including relationships. It’s speed dating versus meeting your soul mate. Everyone I shoot, I want to do so forever. Everyone has their story and, for me, they all of equal importance. The reason I do things the way I do is inextricable from my own sense and understanding of life, society, politics, justice and injustice, stereotypes, and of how enduring, strong and complicated human beings and all our lives are.

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PHOTO STORY // Double Take Keith Medley / Ken Grant / Mark Durden

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Keith Medley was a press and commercial photographer working on Merseyside from for most of his career. Mark Durden and Ken Grant have selected and printed a series of portraits from Medley’s archive of around 30,000 images, held within Liverpool John Moores University. The passport and studio portraits selected were made between 1964 and 1968, a poignant time in the region’s history. By exposing half of the glass plate at a time, Medley would often get two portraits from each negative. By printing these glass plates full frame, Durden and Grant allow us to see how sitters perform their poses to camera.

Project text courtesy of LOOK/13

Keith Medley

Ken Grant

Keith Medley was a commercial and press photographer who worked in and around Merseyside for most of his career. Born in South Africa in 1915, he attended school in the United Kingdom and then spent a period in the merchant navy before taking a photographic apprenticeship in Liverpool at Dorondo Mills, Lime Street. Whilst working here, he photographed the spectacular opening of the Queensway Mersey Tunnel by King George V on July 18th 1934, from a unique vantage point on top of St. George’s Hall. Soon afterwards he moved to London, working for an advertising agency, then subsequently as assistant to Howard Coster, the celebrated society portrait photographer. His portrait of Howard Coster is in the National Portrait Gallery.

Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967. Since the 1980’s he has photographed in the city and engaged in sustained projects both in the region and in wider Europe. For 10 years he contributed to Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, advising on exhibition development. Ken Grant’s photographs are held in important collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum, Essen, and other international public and private collections. He continues to work on long-term projects and exhibits internationally -most recently in Counter Space at MoMA, New York (2011).

After his war service Keith returned to Merseyside and set up a photographic business on King Street, Wallasey, in 1949 in partnership with his ex RAF colleague Bob Bird. The business was very successful, including work on weddings, studio portraits, commercial work and press work for both local and national newspapers. In 1964 Keith became sole owner of the business and continued working until his retirement in 1987.

www.ken-grant.info Mark Durden Born in Stourbridge, UK. Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at Staffordshire University from 1993-1998. From 1998 until 2002, he was Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography at the University of Derby. In 2002 he was made Reader and in 2003 he became Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) Photography Programme at Derby. In the Summer of 2007, he left Derby to join Newport as Professor of Photography.

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ARTICLE // Lost. And Found.

Eleanor o’Kane shots and fingerprints as well as pictures of bloodsoaked crime scenes, tangled car crashes and devastating fires. Rescued from a flooded warehouse in the 1980s and rehoused in Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum, the archives are slowly being sifted through, revealing an astonishing visual record of Sydney’s crime history.

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‘A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion... All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.’

– Richard Avedon The digital age has extended our networks, allowed us to become friends, fans and followers of people we rarely see in the flesh. Sat in front of screens and logged in to social networks, we are confronted daily with headshot after headshot. If one piques our interest we can turn to Google to find out more. If an image is lost and resurfaces years later, long since separated from facts and emotions that brought it into being, the viewer is forced to search for those things anew. When even those whom we barely know have become so familiar, the face of a stranger can be the most intriguing of all.

We have a fascination with the chanced upon. Print magazine Found, is devoted to documenting the scraps of other people’s lives: evidence discovered down the back of second-hand sofas, in attics or underfoot on the streets. From heartbreaking goodbye notes to lovers’ scrawl on cheap notepaper to screwed-up Polaroids and sun-bleached snapshots, our interest is roused but we’re left with nowhere to go. No Google search will reveal why the picture was taken, or who wrote the note: there is no caption to accompany these portraits; we have no closure.

One of the most notable examples of recentlyfound portraits is the archive of the Australia’s New South Wales Police, a collection of around 130,000 negatives taken between 1912 and 1964. Possibly the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere, the archive includes mug

Many of these images could be called mugshots in the loosest sense. Undoubtedly, the purpose of the images was to categorise and classify, however, they are far from the mugshots we know today. Most fascinating are the pictures labelled ‘Special Photographs’. Featuring those who the police believed had the makings of a career criminal, many are portraits of such quality and beauty that they seem to belong in a family album. Taken off the streets and into police stations, the ‘special subjects’ – and even sometimes their companions – were placed in front of the photographer’s lens. We cannot know what conversations took place but the resulting images are fascinating. For many, especially in the very early shots, it would have been one of the few occasions they were invited to sit for a portrait. Smartly-attired men and women straighten up and stare into the photographer’s lens; some smile nervously or place a hand on a hip, others, mainly men, loom confrontationally towards the photographer, blank-faced. A trio of females dressed in their finest glance at each other and grin; if it weren’t for the stark surroundings, this could be a ladies’ day out. That these images remain so beguiling is due, in part to the photographers’ skill, but that they adhered to a rather loose set of rules regarding style and composition. With the frame not restricted to a head-and-shoulders shot, our eyes can drink in the humanity of the subjects: the body language – from puff-chested hoodlums to the teary-eyed and slumped, we can see how the subject chose to dress, if they were a smoker, and whether they chose to sit on a chair, use it as a prop or ignore it.

When some avert their gaze to the floor, it seems more due to sadness than defiance or shame.

In many frames the subject dominates, seemingly refusing to give in to the indignity. How the police photographers reacted to their subjects’ poses we can’t know. Did they guide them or influence them?

There are some clues that the establishment was in control. In his writings about the archives, writer and part-time curator of the Sydney’s Police and Justice Museum Peter Doyle, notes that some of the petty criminals, those whom the police would have had the most contempt for, were photographed by the stalls of the police station toilets, possibly

exerting some control over them. On other negatives the photographers have made annotations, if, for example, the subject wasn’t compliant and refused to open their eyes.

Convicted criminals were not given such freedoms to express themselves. From 1923 prison photographers had to shoot three images; one of the prisoner’s face, a side view of the head and a full-length portrait taken against a height scale. Details about the subject, such as weight and police reference number, were written onto the glass negative, hemming them even more tightly into the convict category. Despite this, there are flashes of resistance. One convicted thief, photographed in 1925, batted her eyelashes during the long exposure and smiled throughout, creating an eerie and memorable mugshot a small but enduring act of rebellion.

The Sydney police images contrast starkly to the project, Found Photos in Detroit, by Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese. Composed of discarded mugshots, Polaroids and other material discovered on the streets and in the abandoned public buildings of Detroit, Arcara and Santese’s resulting project seems so bleak, in part, due to the deterioration of the material which had been water damaged or prematurely aged due to lack of proper storage. It is thought that many of the images in the Detroit project were also from police and social services archives, so it’s plausible to imagine that some of the subjects would have lead equally chaotic lives to their Sydney counterparts. Arcara and Santese originally went to Detroit to document the decline of the city, however, the images they found all around became their focus and a way to portray the economic misfortunes of the city.

Often limited to head-and-shoulders passporttype shots and damaged by time and water, the images have none of the spark and depth of the Australian photographs, and paint an altogether different picture of urban life.

We’re in an age of discovery. Search the web and you’ll find blogs by professional archivists documenting the digging around in crates in the basements of national institutions and museums.

The National Geographic tumblr blog Found, is a curated collection from the organisation’s archives, comprising of images that have rarely seen the light of day since the shutter was pressed. The blog reveals images in no particular order, date or classification, allowing the viewer to discover image after image organically. Most striking are the autochrome portraits, made by a process patented by the Lumière Brothers and used in colour photography into the 1930s. The grainy, colour-soaked images have a vibrancy that transcends their years. Many of the images capture exotic subjects from far-flung lands: a Japanese Geisha dressed in delicate silks; two Algerian servant girls posing for the photographer; a Hungarian csikos herdsman seated on his horse.

Are they smiling because they thought they might end up on the cover of The National Geographic?

Maybe they still will.

The story of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier

adds an element of mystery to her work as so little is known about Maier herself. A secretive and, by all accounts, unsociable woman who worked as a nanny, Maier had a secret life as a street photographer and captured decades of social history. Dying in poverty in 2009, she left behind thousands of unseen prints, negatives and rolls of undeveloped film. Acquired at auction by several buyers, her work is being seen for the first time and includes portraits of high and low society, the children she looked after and, occasionally, herself. While mystery swirls around the selftaught Maier as a person, her photography stands alone for its quality and depth. Her images, which so very nearly went undiscovered, often capture the lost: people lost in thought, in poverty, in selfabsorption.

The Maier archives, although fragmented, are helping to build a portrait of the photographer herself. Seemingly drawn to document society’s outsiders, we know she must have travelled to the wrong side of Chicago’s tracks to shoot much of her work, which is rare for a woman of her time. Images from foreign lands are evidence of a world trip at a time when few people travelled independently and globally - and a single woman of her class practically never could.

With this fascination for Maier’s secret archive (surely the ultimate personal project?), comes the uncomfortable question of whether she would wish her photography to be plundered, her images to be displayed on walls and discussed so widely. Looking at her self-portraits is particularly conflicting. Rare straws to clutch at, they portray the most off-limits subject in Maier’s world: herself.

As with some of the letters and images from the pages of Found magazine, such as “Goodbye…

I love you. Please raise our child to be better than me,” it feels like we’ve stumbled across something so personal that we have to look away. foundmagazine.com – Found magazine www.hht.net.au – Sydney Living Museums Archive www.foundphotosindetroit.com natgeofound.tumblr.com – The National Geographic Found blog www.vivianmaier.com

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PHOTO STORY // Unadorned Julia Fullerton-Batten

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Unadorned is inspired

by Old Master paintings from the 15th to the 17th century.

Over a period of three centuries, these Masters showed that female beauty of that time was represented by a fuller figure - even for men. Throughout history the most sought-after female forms were represented by curvaceous bodies and, in Rubens’ case, of outright corpulence.

It is only in very recent times, since Twiggy and Barbie came to the fore in the 1960s, that our narcissistic society - reinforced by the media and advertising - now interpret the ideal figure to be ultra thin, enhanced by eating disorders and plastic surgery. Even men are beginning to be caught up in this vicious circle. Today’s harsh judgements of obese people is particularly prevalent in the West; in many other cultures, a rounder figure is still highly regarded.

For some time now, I have wanted to photograph people who are labelled ‘fat’ as judged by today’s society. I wanted to get to know their feelings about their bodies and how they would behave in front of the camera lens without any clothes on. In this series, I transposed the Old Masters’ inspirational works into a modern context.

Larger-than-like models of both sexes unashamedly shed their clothes and posed for me in the nude. I placed them individually in a scene with appropriate props and asked them to pose in ways that would show off their shape naturally and enhance their beauty.

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Julia Fullerton-Batten

1 // Donna

Julia Fullerton-Batten was born in Bremen Germany (1970). She spent most of her childhood in Germany and the United States, before moving to the UK when she was 16. She now lives in London. Julia studied photography at the Royal Berkshire College of Art and Design. She started her professional career in 2001 and is now a well-established professional photographer, Julia is rapidly developing a reputation as one of the leading young photographers in Europe.

2 // Dana 3 // Simon 4 // Jessica 5 // Tony 6 // Rikkard 7 // Catherine 8 // Ava

She has had a book published by Actes Sud, “Teenage Stories” in 2007. She has exhibited at Galerie Les Filles Du Calvaire in Paris and Brussels, Camara Oscura in Madrid, Jenkins Johnson and Randall Scott Gallery in New York, Guangdong Museum of Art in China, The Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai and Les Rencontres D’Arles, France, Casa Delll’Arte, Istanbul, Skotia gallery, Santa Fe, Pompidou Center, Paris amongst others.

She has won the Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie award, L’Insense Photo, Sony World Photography Awards and Hasselblad Master in Fine Art, She has a permanent collection in National Portrait Gallery, London and Musee de l’Elysee, Switzerland. www.juliafullerton-batten.com

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IN CONVERSATION // Portrait Salon’s Carole Evans and James O Jenkins discuss what makes a portrait and how Portrait Salon works CE: But the question is: why do people think that is portraiture? And why do they think that they can enter images like that to the NPG Portrait Prize?

What is it about the term portrait that causes so much debate?

JOJ: Well, I think it would be nice to sometimes have a human head to look at in a photograph.

Although, we have had pictures of fish submitted to us…

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Portrait Salon is a form of Salon des Refusés - an exhibition of works rejected from a juried art show, which has a long tradition as a fringe way of showcasing artists’ work that may otherwise go unseen. Devised by Carole Evans and James O Jenkins, Portrait Salon launched in 2011 with a projection and newspaper publication. It aims to show the best of the unselected entries from the annual Taylor Wessing National Portrait Gallery (NPG) Photographic Portrait Prize.

As the third year of judging was underway, Carole and James sat down to discuss themes they feel are vital to the understanding of current portraiture; the nature of portraiture prizes; the challenges portrait artists face in today’s climate; and ask themselves, what, exactly, is a portrait?

Carole Evans (CE): I think that, in terms of current portraiture, we’re in a really interesting place; I was really struck by something Karen Newman (a Portrait Salon judge in 2012) wrote in last year’s foreword for the Portrait Salon newspaper: “What actually makes a portrait these days? With the explosion of networked photography across the web, we’ve never been more aware of our own image. But if Wikipedia’s definition is anything to go by, then the selection process for Portrait Salon should be dead straightforward: “In photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position”.”

James O Jenkins (JOJ): I agree with the Wikipedia quote, I think that a certain level of engagement between photographer and sitter will result in a more composed and considered portrait. Maybe candid snapshots aren’t portraits. But then who am I to decide? People can make up their own minds.

CE: Yes, we have had portraits of fish. Strictly speaking it wasn’t just a fish, there was someone looking at the fish on the other side of the fish tank. But it was so heavily Photoshopped you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a portrait of a fish. But I think what this highlights is that the NPG Prize attracts a lot of amateur submissions.

And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way a lot of what is rejected from the NPG Prize is amateur work. Why is that?

JOJ: I think that’s to do with the fact that it’s the National Portrait Gallery. It’s the prize money.

The profile. Most photographers would want their work shown in a national institution like that, even though there are tonnes of other opportunities and spaces and prizes where your work can be shown, submitted, seen, etc. It’s also an international prize.

And it’s a punt. When you enter work into the NPG selection process, you are effectively gambling. But I think that some people’s odds are a lot better than others. And when it’s £26 a pop per print, some people might do well to spend their money elsewhere.

CE: But apart from the prize money, what do you actually get? Some people say that unless you finish in the top three there’s little reward.

But I disagree.

JOJ: I agree with you. Why would you not want to be selected? But I have heard people argue that photo competitions and prizes are pointless. They stop you from shooting naturally, you shoot with an eye on the prize, how dare one jury or person say what is or isn’t any good, and so on.

CE: The thing is, the idea of a portrait differs a lot depending on the type of photographer. Some people may think a picture of their child on a swing is a portrait, others may not; it’s so subjective.

JOJ: Exactly. That’s why this year is a great opportunity for Portrait Salon to show all the work that is submitted to us, as well as the invited judges selection. Hopefully showing everything

will be an opportunity for people to see what they are competing with (or not) when entering the competition.

CE: Yes, it could be quite an education! Even for professionals. I remember us being surprised at what some of the photographers we knew chose to enter. It wasn’t necessarily their best work.

Maybe it’s the editing process that goes a bit wrong, or maybe they’re just entering what they think stands a chance JOJ: And maybe there is a lot of work that is entered and selected by the NPG that is very stereotypically a portrait. It can look a bit, same old, same old. It would be great to see new approaches to portraits being shown, fresh, exciting work. I’d like to see more types of work like Cristina De Middel’s ‘Afronauts’ – examples of projects that have been shot in a different way.

I think with the NPG, portraiture seems to be shown and spoken about in a very traditional way, which is fine and relates back to painting and so on, but it’s starting to feel a bit stuffy. There doesn’t seem to be much rule-breaking going on.

CE: And portraits don’t necessarily have to represent the character of a person. As with Cristina’s Afronauts, it’s staged really well obviously they’re not really astronauts. Perhaps, that’s where contemporary portraiture is heading?

JOJ: Fingers crossed. I hope that we haven’t reached a point where it looks as though we can’t progress further because of what prizes like the NPG are selecting. It’d be good to see some exciting and brave work being consistently selected. Where’s our Weegee of today?

A contemporary portrait project that I keep looking at is Niall McDiarmid’s ‘Crossing Paths’ series (which he updates people about regularly on Twitter). It’s well executed and the project works as series. It’s natural, not shot for anyone, or with a publication or prize in mind. More importantly, it makes me think about the process Niall has gone through in approaching strangers.

I imagine he gets his fair shares of ‘No, thanks’.

Which is also what entering competitions like the Taylor Wessing NPG Prize is about. About being turned down. And who cares if they say no and don’t select your work?

CE: And it’s not sentimental. The subjects just are who they are. It’s harking back to the days of Arbus almost – the boldness of approaching someone in the street and asking them for a photograph. One of the best contemporary portrait projects I’ve seen in recent times is Katy Grannan’s Boulevard. Again, a street approach, a sort of collection of misfits who have a vague resemblance to celebrities… and then they begin to represent each of us too, somehow. Each portrait is filled with narrative. Maybe that’s it: maybe portraiture is becoming too sentimental.

There aren’t enough real people and there isn’t enough narrative. It has become clinical and predictable. Or at least, that’s what the NPG prize would lead us to believe.

Submissions to Portrait Salon open once NPG rejection letters have been sent to photographers (usually the second week of August). Their online submission deadline is September 21st, the selection is made in October and work is shown and published in November. Portrait Salon will be showing at Four Corners from November 11 to 16 www.portraitsalon.co.uk

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PHOTO STORY // Re-Enactors Jim Naughten

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Every summer thousands of people from all over the world gather in a field in Kent and leave the present firmly behind. They step out of their routine daily lives and transform into historical characters from the First and Second World War, often with such vigour and obsessive attention to detail that it’s hard to imagine them in contemporary settings.

Taking on a different name, identity and sometimes even a different tongue, the role players re-enact battles and drills from an imagined past. It is something more than acting, a collective fantasy played out on a massive scale.

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Jim Naughten

1 // Soviet Cossack

Jim Naughten is an artist living and working in London.

2 // Civilian in White Suit 3 // Brigadefßhrer, 1SS Division 4 // Post-War British Tank Crewman 5 // British WW1 Soldier 6 // British WW2 Private with Tam O’Shanter 7 // Evacuee boy in green coat 8 // Norland Panzer Grenadier

www.jimnaughten.com

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ARTICLE // Ways of Seeing Portraiture Alis Oldfield

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Portraiture is a genre laced with romantic fancifications.

Photographers often boast that they have captured the spirit of a person, or that the subject’s eye presents a window to their soul.

We’ve learnt not to trust photographs implicitly, to decode them and fill in the gaps of misinformation, so why should someone’s portrait be any different?

There is certainly value in the photographic portrait, but there are layers of representation and cultural context that we have to peel off first.

The ability to look at a photograph and recognise the misguiding elements of it, I think, is a form of psychological inference; the ability to deduce the reality of a situation from what we can sense, and what it logically shows. For example, we see a picture of a man in mid-air and recognise, immediately, a moment severed from its context: a man falling. We do not marvel at his conquest of gravity. Of course, there are times when our perceptions, our assumptions, are wrong, and equally, there are times when photographers attempt to trick us; but within the remit of straight photography we have developed the ability to look through the image and the processes used to make it, to read the image and to see the reality it was recording. Surely, then, we should apply the same logic to the reading of the portrait? Instead of taking for granted that we are seeing an insightful record, we should first evaluate what the face really offers as a representation of a person’s character and then assess how the presence of the camera might affect the situation.

The face is a combination of biological features and changeable elements, the latter of which form what I will call the ‘visual projection’: the things that we have the ability to control. These are features such as our hairstyle, the material adornments we choose and, depending

on our morning routine, the cosmetics we apply. Of course this is a generalisation: there will be times or places in which our control over these elements is taken from us; if, for example, our falling man’s hairdresser misheard his request for a short back and sides and instead sharpened the razor for a wet shave. Generally though, this visual projection is a combination of choices, all of which we may adjust in order to best express how we view ourselves. These choices are inextricable from wider cultural mechanisms - our sense of fashion is, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on both the place and the time that we live in.

It goes without saying that to better understand individual choices, it is necessary to understand their culture and surroundings. In this way, our socio-cultural understanding of an individual’s immediate environment allows us to gather more information, more clues, on how they wish to be seen, and thus the image of themselves that they present to the world.

Conversely, we are born with features predetermined by our DNA: without surgical interference we have no choice in how large our nose is or how harshly our eyebrows frame our face. The idea that the facial features are associated with certain personality traits has been explored since as early as the Fourth century, and has notoriously sinister connotations.

A family with an infamously fiery temper might coincidentally have bright red cheeks, and it’s something that has been, historically, all too easy to correlate. The study of physiognomy, the practice of assessing a person’s personality through their facial features, has been rejected by modern science and it has been proven that the face bears no resemblance to the personality or characteristics of those who sport it. We are taught from childhood not to ‘judge a book by its cover’, although it is something that people invariably (and immediately) do. It is impossible to measure how quickly and to what extent people can dismiss or judge others based on physical features alone, however, what is evident is that we should aim to look beyond.

The inability of the facial features to communicate personality has been explored and expanded upon by many photographers, and notably in photographer Thomas Ruff’s postmodern critique of portraiture, in which Ruff emphasizes the visual facade produced by the one-dimensional photograph. With works such as these in mind, what conclusions are we able to draw about the faces we are trying to record in photographic portraits? That we must be mindful of both the

individual ability to express themselves via their ‘visual projection’, but that we cannot deduce personality traits through biological physical appearance.

If we are to ignore, for the purpose of this essay, the extra human element (in the form of the photographer) and focus solely on the relationship between the subject and the camera, it is necessary to look at the introduction of the camera and how this affects the context or the visual projection of the sitter. The camera commits our image to a moment in history and knowledge of the methods and outcomes of the camera changes the way we interact with it as an object. The sensation of being aware of yourself, and the lasting record of the image to follow, is bound to have an effect on those photographed. As influential drama theorist Richard Schechner commented that there is, “a certain distance between ‘self’ and behavior, analogous to that between actor and the role that the actor plays onstage”. He goes on to say that we “may do actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this introduces a consciousness that gives them the quality of performance.”

This implies that the use of a camera alters the very situation it attempts to record by changing the characteristics of the subject(s). In doing this, the camera is creating another layer of intention behind the projection of self. Perhaps it is this intention and this intensification of the sitter’s visual projection that helps create the mesmerizing quality of portraits that people find so appealing and simultaneously so perplexing.

Taking these points into consideration, we can begin to assess the value of portraiture. If we are unable to ‘read’ anything within the image from the biologically governed featured of the sitter, the camera can be said to offer nothing more than a recording of visual projection of the sitter.

Again, the effect of the camera on the subject is dependent upon a range of differing factors such as environment and context; our falling man who walks past the same security camera every day on his way to work might have less of a self-conscious response to it than an Amish girl, when sitting for her first portrait. We can therefore determine that the information offered by the portrait increases in value when understood within its context.

Our conclusion may be summarized as follows: if we use the psychological inference that we have developed around photography and direct this to our understanding of portraiture, we may distinguish between the misinterpretation of the image and the misinformation presented within it. In the same way that we have learned not to marvel at a suspended man when looking at an image of someone falling, we must learn to not expect an insight into the subject’s soul when looking at his or her image. What we are seeing is a piece of information about the sitter within a larger puzzle of context and environment. We can aim to look beyond the uncontrollable elements and the self-awareness caused by the camera to find value in what is left to understand: the subject’s chosen visual projection in relation to how they respond to being recorded.

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PHOTO STORY // Wilder Mann The Image of the Savage Charles Fréger

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Each year, throughout Europe, from Scotland to Bulgaria, from Finland to Italy, from Portugal to Greece via France, Switzerland and Germany, people literally put themselves into the skin of the ‘savage’, in masquerades that stretch back centuries.

By becoming a bear, a goat, a stag or a wild boar, a man of straw, a devil or a monster with jaws of steel, these people celebrate the cycle of life and of the seasons. Their costumes, made of animal skins or of plants, and decorated with bones, encircled with bells, and capped with horns or antlers, amaze us with their extraordinary diversity and prodigious beauty.

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Photo Captions

Charles Fréger

1 // Schnappviecher, Tramin, Italy

Born in 1975, Charles Fréger is a graduate of the Rouen Art School. He has devoted himself to the poetic and anthropological representation of social groups such as athletes, school children, the armed forces, etc.His work offers a reflection upon the image of contemporary youth. Charles Fréger is also the founder of the artistic community Piece of Cake (www.pocproject.com) and of the POC publishing house.

2 // Strohmann (Straw Man), Leipferdingen, Germany 3 // Busó, Mohács, Hungary 4 // Babugeri, Bansko, Bulgaria 5 // Nuuttipukki, Sastamala, Finland 6 // Krampus, Bad Mitterndorf, Austria 7 // Zezengorri, Pamplona, Basque Country, Spain 8 // Ours (Bear), Saint-Larent-de-Cerdans, France

www.charlesfreger.com

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ARTICLE // Rehearsals of Reality - Some Thoughts on Performative Self-Portraiture Joanna Cresswell projects that placed mutual importance on both performance and photographic document.

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The term ‘document’ has often been thought of as synonymous with the medium of photography itself, and its indexical power has long been presented as the perfect tool with which to represent ‘real’ life. Yet, since its very inception, photography has always been linked with ideas of staging and acting out, and has been acknowledged for its tentative relationship with truth. Photographers have long been working with this paradox – collapsing the boundaries between fact and fiction, between performance and document: employing the theatrical rhetoric of the documentary photograph, and imitating the way photography is employed in society to stage infinite variations of situations found within social structures. The key here is found in the matter of tenses, and in understanding that we are not just looking at situations that have happened or will happen; but also ones that may (or may never) happen.

In his paper ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, Philip Auslander offered a groundbreaking argument for the mutual importance of performance and its document.

Auslander adopted the term ‘performative’ from J L Austin’s writings about language, in which Austin offers that an utterance that is in itself an action is called ‘a performative’. For instance, in saying the words ‘I do’, one has physically become married. Applying this theory to photographic practice, Auslander proposed that instead of a photographic document being a constative that describes a performance, it is performative in itself, “the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such” (1956). Photographers have been working with the ideas Auslander posited ever since his radical re-evaluation: artists have echoed the words of Auslander, creating

Honing this wider view of photographic practice into the subject of self-portraiture, it is interesting to see how the camera, as an incredibly powerful tool with which to explore oneself – to look back upon oneself – has increasingly become a key instrument in the way artists attempt to understand themselves, and furthermore how they manipulate the image-making process to portray themselves to the outside world. The act of staging a selfportrait is exponentially more complex than simply documenting oneself – how true a representation can it be after all, even on the most basic level? For many artists, this notion is the whole under-current of their work; many will employ a ‘documentary aesthetic’ in their work, but every self-portrait can be seen as a performance in some way.

In recognising the theatrical qualities of the medium, one is able to find this performative vein and many great examples of self-representation in contemporary works: in the characters that Cindy Sherman creates for herself; or in the varying personas Nikki S. Lee embodies each time she immerses herself within a different social group; or in the way Gillian Wearing personifies her family. One would suggest that artists working in this way have often begun living their work, playing out experiences in order for them to be photographed, and indeed, photographing in order to make sense of experiences. Taking the images out in the public realm, there is a sense of collective motion towards fusing the real and the staged, and working towards a goal of making them indistinguishable. The camera allows for a certain degree of fantasy that cannot be found elsewhere and, in this sense, places become ‘sets’, artists become ‘characters’ and we (the viewer) become ‘the audience’. It is as if the resulting photographs are, if talking in terms of the theatre, the rehearsal.

In the 2009 publication ‘Theatres of the Real,’ David Chandler offers the ‘post-document’ as a way of understanding the deconstruction of documentary practice and its subsequent theatricality, and Bill Nichols offers the ‘preenactment’, which is defined as ‘the more or less authentic (re)construction of events that are yet to happen’ (cited in Baetens’ ‘Theatres’).

This notion of the anticipation of a reality yet to be lived - of the photograph as a stage on which to play out potential social encounters - is one

that can indeed resonate through the practice of self-portraiture. Furthermore, it is, perhaps, in this sense of anticipation that one can find a way of understanding: where artists, who engage with this type of work, sit; anticipating something does not necessarily secure its definite happening, and it is here that the notion of the ‘rehearsal’ can really be explored. Photographers working with selfportraiture almost seem to be found somewhere between both Chandler’s ‘post-document’ and Nichols’ ‘pre-enactment’. Rather than ‘yet to happen’, the personas artists build up are all possibilities - potential scenarios and selves that have been fused out of a hybrid of reality, memory, history and imagination. Everything is able to fluctuate between being a convincing document and a successful staging, and there seems to be a common middle ground in aiming for the void, the unseen, and the possible.

It is often said that when an author creates a character in a novel, she is able to project herself upon it. In this idea of performative self-portraiture we find the same alluring prospect: the artist is able to take on any desired persona and hide behind the façade of the image. With the persistent use of the theatrical rhetoric of the documentary photograph to stage infinite variations of ourselves, it could well be argued that the medium is becoming a tool for hypothesising.

Photographers are rehearsing and imitating reality within the space of the photograph and creating hypothetical ‘could-be’ selves, mirroring the ‘real’ world and using it to embody and visualise possible (and impossible) experiences and infinite versions of themselves. Artists must continue to turn the camera upon themselves and embrace the uncanny scenarios and personas that emerge from this type of work. These are the ones that can be recognised because, bizarre as they may be, we encounter variations of them in ‘real’ life in any number of forms and any number of ways, from seeing them in movies and on our streets, to seeing them in our reflections and meeting them in our dreams.

Bibliography Auslander, Philip. The Performativity of Performance Documentation. Performing Arts Journal. 84. September 2006.

Baetens, Jan. The Creative Treatment of Narrative: A Poetics of The In-Between in Theatres of the Real.

Eds. Joanna Lowry and David Green. Brighton: Photoworks, 2009. 97 – 101.

Chandler, David. Foreword in Theatres of the Real.

Eds. Joanna Lowry and David Green. Brighton: Photoworks, 2009. 4 – 5.

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PHOTO STORY // George and Pat Beacher, The Abbotsbury Album MacDonaldStrand

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Commissioned for the Krakow Photo Festival, George and Pat Beacher, The Abbotsbury Album is the story of a young couple in the late 1950s who toured the coastal resorts of the South of England making photographs as they went. The photographs were always of the pair in acrobatic balances and were part of an elaborate courting ritual, but were also, accidentally, precursors to the conceptual art movement in the UK.

MacDonaldStrand MacDonaldStrand are the collaborative partnership of Gordon MacDonald and Clare Strand. They are based in Brighton, England.

MacDonald founded and, until recently, edited Photoworks magazine. He is a co-founder of the Brighton Photo Fringe and Chair of the Board of Trustees. He is also co-Director of GOST Books, alongside Stuart Smith; a new photography and visual arts publishers based in London. Strand is an internationally recognised artist whose work is held in many private and public collections including the Arts Council of England collection, the National Collection at the V&A and Collection CentrĂŠ Pompidou. She is represented by Brancolini Grimaldi, London. www.macdonaldstrand.co.uk // @MacDonaldStrand

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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 Sälgvik, 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 Joanna L. Cresswell Joanna L. Cresswell is an arts writer based in London. She studied Photography at the University of Brighton and and has written for a number of international magazines and journals, including British Journal of Photography, This Is Tomorrow, ArtQuest and Miniclick, as well as being a regular contributor to HotShoe International. Joanna also works as Project Manager and Editor at Self Publish, Be Happy, an organisation that aims to celebrate, study and promote self-published photobooks through events, publications and online exposure. www.joannalcresswell.tumblr.com // @JoannaCresswell

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Maja Daniels Maja Daniels is a Swedish independent photographer currently based in London.

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.

Dividing her time between long-term documentary projects and commercial work, Maja 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 Carole Evans Carole Evans is an experienced curator, educator and photographer. After graduating from an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster in 2007, and working for seven years as Gallery Coordinator at Photofusion in Brixton, she is now teaching photography at Richmond Adult Community College and working independently as a curator and photographer.

In 2011, Carole co-founded Portrait Salon with James O Jenkins, an Arts Council funded project promoting contemporary photographic portraiture.

Her latest venture is a pop-up arts festival in her home town of Altrincham, South Manchester. www.caroleevans.co.uk // @gallerytart

Miranda Gavin Miranda Gavin is Editor-at-Large for Hotshoe International; Editor of Frame and Reference (www.frameandreference.com) - a visual arts website for the South East; and runs a photography-themed blog, The Roaming Eye. She has contributed to numerous photography publications in the UK and abroad, including Katalog, British Journal of Photography, The Times photography supplement and MONO. In 2010, she co-founded Tri-pod (www.tri-pod. co.uk), a creative initiative that supports lensbased artists with personal projects in process.

Miranda judges photography competitions, does portfolio reviews and regularly delivers and chairs photography-related talks. www.theroamingeye.wordpress.com // @mirandagavin James O Jenkins James O Jenkins is a photographer and co-founder of Portrait Salon (www.portraitsalon.co.uk).

He has exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, The Association of Photographers and Hotshoe Gallery. His work has featured in publications such as The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent on Sunday and Creative Review.

Last year he published his first book ‘United Kingdom’, a visual study of traditional annual UK customs. This year he set up ‘A Fine Beginning’, a Welsh photography collective (@afinebeginning) that celebrates photography in Wales. www.jamesojenkins.co.uk // @jamesojenkins Eleanor O’Kane Former Deputy Editor of Professional Photographer magazine Eleanor later worked as Social Media Editor for Hungry Eye magazine where she explored how technology, and social media in particular, enables image-makers 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, imagemaking and lifestyle. www.eleanorokane.com // @eleanorokane

Alis Oldfield Since graduating from the Documentary Photography degree at the University of Newport in 2011 Alis has pursued a career in visual art; managing independent art galleries in both Hong Kong and London where she is now based. Alis is about to enroll on the M.A. in Photography at the Royal College of Art. www.alisoldfield.co.uk // @alisoldfield

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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

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

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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 Editorial Assistants: Kristina Salgvik & Jack Latham

Publication #3 due Winter, 2013

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