INTRODUCTION In the 46th year of our course, it is my pleasure to introduce this publication showcasing the work of USW’s Documentary Photography’s graduating class of 2020. The publication comes at an unprecedented time for us all, and an important one in my view for what documentary and the arts more widely can offer. It has been disappointing that due to Covid-19 we have been forced to cancel our graduation exhibition, but it is a credit to the students who have met the challenge to develop such an interesting suite of materials. This publication is therefore accompanied by an online virtual exhibition, giving an opportunity to experience some of the elements specific to installation, but also to display some of the multimedia, moving image, and online content with which many of them have engaged. The projects showcased here and online engage with a wide range of themes informed by their own experiences in society; considering topics including social class, gender and disability, environmental and geopolitical issues, loss and grief, confinement and psychology. I congratulate the students featured here for their hard work and passion. I would also like to thank our friends and colleagues Alejandro Acin and Alastair Myers from IC Visual Lab, who has designed the publication, my colleagues Lisa Barnard, David Barnes and the wider team at USW. Paul Reas, Course Leader, Documentary Photography BA (hons)
MEZZANINE: the architectural and metaphorical in between. The idea of being in flux is a fitting device for considering the context in which this book has been produced. Mezzanine is our love letter to an experience of growth and education in challenging times. Beginning with the uncertainty of the Brexit referendum, middling at the Conservative landslide in the 2019 Winter general election and continuing during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the featured works engage with feelings of in-betweenness that individuals or communities in various guises have been experiencing in these times. All of the projects are connected in their direct encounters with the world and made by authors who are passionate about the possibilities of representation. Mezzanine represents a diversity of opinions and voices from different walks of life that ultimately is the culmination of three years of education, mentorship and immersion in the photographic industry. Our graduate year has seen us develop our practices to the point of understanding where we might fit into that industry, as daunting and impenetrable as it sometimes seems. This is our celebration of the journey we have undertaken together, and a collective thank you to all those who were part of it. With Mezzanine, we are signing off and preparing to step into the world with a feeling of hopefulness and determination. Daniel Harvey Gonzalez
ARTISTS Marzia Borracci Fran Gonzalez Camacho Rhys Davies Daniel Harvey Gonzalez Polly Hill Ruby Ingleheart Kamil D. Jantos Milo Jones Alexander Komenda Helen Slocombe Shannon O’Donnell
MARZIA BORRACCI
Rome. A city of eternal contradictions where the glorious past collides with the inevitable present. The capital of myths, legends, uncomfortable truths and scandals. A city where the calamitous present and the past live together in a dizzying contemporaneity. This is the charm of a city that enchants humanity with its omnipresent history, a city whose history means it has had to work twice as hard as its European counterparts to embrace modernity and the innovations of the future. Like any respectful city of the antiquity, Rome needed a monument that reaffirmed the greatness of its empire and filled its people with pride and happiness. Thanks to Roman engineering, two thousand years later, it still stands: The Colosseum. The Colosseum began as an amphitheatre. It was a place to perform executions, an archaic form of entertainment, where gladiators and executioners played the main characters. Gladiators became synonymous with Rome’s glory and in turn used as propaganda. Today the Colosseum hosts a new kind of spectator, armed only with their decision-making thumbs and shouts of acclamation, they wear sunglasses on their faces and cameras around their necks. Arena represents a place where spectators and performers coexist in a juxtaposition of the great gestures of our ancestors, and the gestures of a passionate people holding onto a glorious past in a rapidly changing modern world. Website: www.marziaborracci.com Instagram: @marziaborracci
FRAN GONZALEZ CAMACHO
When we have a strong experience or trauma it always comes back to us, we are condemned to live it again. Ouroboros is a very ancient concept that refers to the eternity of time and the cyclical nature of it. This project explores that feeling of loss and its relationship to my mother and my brother. Website: www.frangc.com Instagram: @frangonzalezfoto
RHYS DAVIES
When a goose ferociously flaps its wings, it is a defence mechanism designed to protect its family from predators. Even though it will inflict pain on itself, the goose strives to safeguard its own from impending harm. Slowly I am building a new relationship with my father, one that is tinged with self-inflicting pain as his future is uncertain. I want, I need to be close to him as he receives treatment for a terminal diagnosis that he has rebuffed for the last twelve years and that I have had knowledge of since the age of nine. The impact and understanding of his ill health has been traumatic and unsettling; the prospect of my father dying hangs over me like The Sword of Damocles. My father has suffered too, not knowing what each day will bring, with suicidal thoughts and depressive episodes, the reality of his existence. The process of creating a visual diary of our new, rekindled and honest relationship are expressed in this work. The intimate, skin to skin connections of father and son force conversations that neither of us would have dared to speak just a short while ago. Just like the goose, I have grown protective of our newly found intimacy and the closeness that only the love of a father can bring. The camera has permanently etched our relationship in the present and will push the past into the annals of history. I am protecting these new memories even though our newly found closeness will make his inevitable demise more painful. Website: www.rhysjondavies.com Instagram: @rhysjondavies
DANIEL HARVEY GONZALEZ
Built in 1949, Basildon is the last and the largest of the post-war new towns built in Britain specifically to house the expanding population of working-class east Londoners displaced by the war. Basildon is home to the Basildon Man (otherwise known as “Mr. Thatcher,” or “Mondeo Man”) archetype, immortalised in the 1980’s by social commentator Harry Enfield’s “Loadsamoney”, a character portrayed as an illiterate working class painter and decorator with no sense, but with plenty of money as a result of Thatcherite economic policy. However, as Hayes and Hudson note in their book “Basildon: The Mood of the Nation”, Basildon’s sense of aspiration and prosperity “began to erode” with Thatcher’s downfall. Nearly thirty years on from Thatcher’s period in office and Basildon’s working class are no longer considered aspirational. In the generations born after Basildon Man, money and economic investment dried up. In the Government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation 2019 report, many of Basildon’s districts currently rank in the top 10% of the country’s most deprived areas. Bellwether Town explores the relationship between place and identity for a group of young people aged 17 to 22 who have experienced the consequences of economic downturn in a place once described by Hayes and Hudson as the “laboratory of Thatcher’s revolution”. With thanks and love to Connor, Tom, Luke, Alex, Katie, Ella, Regan, and Kicks. Website: www.danielharveygonzalez.com Instagram: @danielharveygonzalez
POLLY HILL
Mother Never Hurt Me is a personal photographic exploration focusing on the parallels between the destructive treatment of my body as a physically disabled woman and the treatment of the natural world by wider society. This stems from ideas of beauty and femininity that have caused fractured and fragmented feelings revolving around my own personal experience of being physically disabled. In this work I address the mental and physical aspects that make me who I am as well as the vulnerabilities caused by my ways of thinking about my body. I wanted to show how important the natural world is to me as a disabled person and how, along with the apparatus of photography, it has been used to process trauma, ultimately healing and reconnecting my body to the earth and its wounds. “When everyone turned their eyes away and hurt you, Mother Nature was there with open arms” is what a therapist expressed to me when discussing the pain and trauma, both physical and mental, inflicted upon me by myself and others. This really stuck with me and made me very aware of the powerful effects that my life experiences have had on how I view myself and made me aware of the coping mechanisms I have adopted to cope with traumatic thoughts and navigate relationships in life. In the words of art historian Margaret Iversen, “trauma creates a disturbingly ambiguous relationship between inside and outside, self and other”. Primitivism and the Brücke art movement inspired this work heavily, with the aim of bridging the gap of difference in experience between the artist and wider society. Instagram: @pollyhill_photo
RUBY INGLEHEART
Nonsense literature is a broad genre with early examples dating back to the beginning of the 17th century, often made up of contradictory sentences which subvert language conventions and question logical reasoning. Although most frequently found in children’s books and folklore, linguists and scholars used ‘nonsense’ as a way to challenge our socially manufactured perception of order. One Day in the Middle of the Night is a visual response to the conflicting and oftentimes confusing messages the United Kingdom is receiving during the Covid-19 lockdown measures, exploring this idea of the disruption of sense. Instagram: @ingleheartruby
KAMIL D. JANTOS
In 1932 Poland officially passed legislature decriminalising homosexuality. Since then, Poland’s, ultra-conservative right-wing government have utilised traditional Christian beliefs and the rise in European nationalist populism to oppress its LGBT community. ‘LGBT free’ zones are becoming increasingly prevalent. In 2019 the leader of Poland’s largest political party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was quoted as saying that “the LGBT and gender movement threaten our identity, threaten our nation [and] threaten the Polish state.” Today, almost one hundred municipalities across one third of Poland have areas where gender ‘ideologies’ and gay pride marches have been banned citing ‘pro-family’ resolutions. Archbishops openly warn of ‘the rainbow plague’ and the unofficial Polish motto of ‘God, Honour, Fatherland’ is now considered to exclude people such as myself. Website: www.kamildjantos.com Instagram: @kamildjantos
MILO JONES
It takes a lot to lead to the kind of population declines that we’re experiencing today. A popular opinion is that planet Earth is on the brink of its sixth extinction event brought on by rising levels of carbon dioxide. A study from NASA shows that we are currently sitting at 420 PPM (parts per million) levels of CO2, a 40% increase from 1950. Historically the End Permillian Event, Earth’s most catastrophic mass extinction to date, was also brought on by high levels of CO2. This event, caused by an eruption in Siberia, wiped out an estimated 96% of all species on the planet, setting life back roughly 300 million years. There is a striking similarity between this event and what we humans are putting the planet through now. A State of Nature study from the UK’s National Biodiversity Network shows that there’s a demonstrable decline in 41% of Earth’s species, an estimated 440 of those bseing plant species, which are on the verge of extinction. Through a combination of traditional analogue processes and contemporary scanning technology, Finis comprises photographs made on trails and national parks across Wales in conjunction with specimen scans of these rare species made in the Herbarium, in the Botanical Department of the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. Finis aims to explore the impact of, and create insight into, decreasing plant populations. With thanks to the National Museum of Wales. Instagram: @milo.oscarjones
leave no trace
ALEXANDER KOMENDA
Mailuu-Suu, a once secret ‘atomgrad’ municipality code named ‘Mailbox 200’, located in today’s southern Kyrgyzstan, was a central mining hub part of the Soviet atomic programme where uranium ore mining took place between 1946 and 1968. Consequently, a total of 23 toxic tailings were hastily disposed, some located in areas vulnerable to erosion, near the river as well as located in areas of unstable tectonic activity, threatening both the community today and the populous Ferghana valley downriver. To quote Barry Commoner, founder of the modern environmental movement and cellular biologist, “New technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs.” A visual dialogue between fact and fiction, Jove’s Palace examines how the fortuitous nature of political geography defined by the Cold War impacts the youth’s current relationship to the circumambient anthropomorphic landscape. By the same token, the atomic age has epitomized technology’s function within its hierarchy, as its international militarisation has culminated in one of civilisation’s greatest existential threats. Moreover, uranium extracted from MailuuSuu was reportedly utilised for the creation of the first atomic bomb for the Soviet nuclear program. In turn, its inaugural geographical manifestation recalls Homer’s ‘two urns’ in Jove’s palace containing good and evil gifts” from the Iliad; a duality equally contingent to atomic energy as to Pandora’s Box. Instagram: @alexanderkomenda
HELEN SLOCOMBE
On the 23rd March 2020, the UK government announced lockdown measures as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, asking the general public to stay at home for all but essential trips out. For many, the mundanity and uncertainty of our confinement has slowed time and space to a dull pause. A direct influence on my photography has been understanding the writing of Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault references the design of the Panopticon, a prison intended to be built spherically around guard towers, allowing for constant visibility of all prisoners simultaneously. Foucault calls this a metaphor for the ‘modern disciplinary society’, effectively marginalising groups of people and dictating their behaviours. The effect of this limbo on our domestic spaces is comparable to that of disciplinary society. In my circumstances this has been emphasised by the scaffolding erected around my flat block for cladding replacement works; the miserable steel bars enveloping my windows and doubling that sensation of feeling trapped. The effect of the scaffolding on my living space is visualised through my photography by the silhouettes cast into my room throughout the day by the haphazard lines of the scaffolding. Photographed using a polaroid camera, the intensity of the harsh flash and the immediacy of the print mimic my own anxieties around the UK in lockdown. Instagram: @helenfslocombe
SHANNON O’DONNELL
Gender is being re-conceptualised. Our experience of gender is changing, transforming from solely male and female to a multitude of subcategories that includes gender queer, non-binary, transgender and gender fluid. As we unpick the complicated narrative of gender and the generalisations that it encapsulates, we are forced to reimagine what it is that makes us who we are and what we want or can identify as. The beginning of change starts with the self. That’s Not the Way the River Flows is a photographic series that playfully explores masculinity and femininity through selfportraits. The work is comprised of stills taken from moving image of the artist performing scenes in front of the camera. This project aims to show the inner conflicts that the artist has with identity and the gendered experience. It reveals the pressures, stereotypes and difficulties faced when growing up in a heavily, yet subtly, gendered society and how that has impacted the acceptance and exploration of the self. Website: www.shannonodonnell.co.uk Instagram: @shannonodonnell14
Firstly, we would like to thank our dedicated lecturers Paul Reas, Lisa Barnard, David Barnes, Mark Durden and Eileen Little for their guidance over the past three years. Also, to Clive Landen and Alejandro Acin and many other visiting lecturers and specialists. Academic Manager Photography and Art, Carol Hiles. Technical demonstrators Gawain Barnard, Sarah Barnes and Ian Llewellyn and to all the administration and support staff at USW Atrium in Cardiff. In terms of this publication we thank Alastair Myers and Alejandro Acin for their guidance and for the design of this publication. Shannon O’Donnell and Rhys Davies for managing this project. Daniel Harvey Gonzalez for the preface. Milo Jones and Polly Hill for the creation of the online digital graduation exhibition. Finally, we would like to thank our fellow classmates for making our university experience one that we will not forget. Thank you