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reviewfinder Exhibitions at the Viewfinder Photography Gallery from February 2008 to June 2009

Catalogue writers:

Guest curators:

Tim Clark Phil Clarke-Hill Eloise Donnelly Louise Forrester Sophie Grainger Dr Meena Khatwa John Levett Lionel Openshaw Dominic Paterson Lisa Robertson Paula Silcox Cate Trotter Pedro Vicente

24 Photography Bombay Mix Paula Silcox Viewfinder curator & manager: Louise Forrester Publisher: Viewfinder Photography Gallery Linear House, Peyton Place, off Royal Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 8RS

Catalogue editors: www.viewfinder.org.uk Jamie Downham (DestinAsian, Peculiar Processes) Lisa Robertson (Open Salon 2009, Picture the Moment, Painterly Photographs, Dreams, One at a Time, School Run) Gwen Webber (Amazingness, Nearly Nothing, Not Performing, Lustrabotas) Catalogue designer: Mandana Ahmadvazir Template by Louise Forrester

First published May 2009 Š The artists and authors The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily the views of the publisher or the editors.

The publisher and the editors accept no responsibility for any errors or for the results of the use of any information contained within the publication.

introduction Louise Forrester

From solo exhibitions (Amazingness, Lustrabotas and Peculiar Processes) to connecting individual photographers in themed exhibitions (Marking/Erasing, Nearly Nothing, Not Performing, Picture the Moment, Painterly Photographs, Dreams, School Run); from opening the space to groups and collectives (24 Photography, Greenwich LIP Satellite Group) to guest curators (DestinAsian:Viewfinder, One at a Time); from inviting the public to exhibit with no curatorial restrictions (Open Salon) to inviting visitors to respond to current exhibitions and send in their own photographs for display (Open Salon and Amazingness), it’s been a whirlwind of a year.

We are proud that recent exhibitions have been selected as the top exhibition to visit in the British Journal of Photography, Culture 24’s top exhibition to visit in Photomonth, and in thelondonpaper’s ‘3 Things to Do’.

We were also delighted to be finalists in Best Use of Science or Technology, Sustainable Business of the Year and Diversity in Business in the Thames Gateway Business Awards 2008; and finalist in Environmental Business of the Year at the Archant London Environmental Awards 2008.

The exhibition catalogues we have introduced provide a lasting record of exhibitions, with interviews, essays, poems and artist statements. ‘ReViewfinder’ collates the key research commissioned for exhibition catalogues – for the complete catalogues, please see the copies available at the gallery or www.viewfinder.org.uk/shop.html.

Introducing creative photography workshops to accompany most exhibitions has been a stimulating experience, with some wonderful photographs taken both by complete beginners and experienced photographers in response to current exhibitions: please see www.viewfinder.org.uk/workshops.html.

None of this would have been possible without the unique and thought-provoking work by participating photographers; the insightful contributions from writers; the support of Viewfinder members; the dedication and incredible generosity of our volunteers (William Armstrong, Kathleen Brey, Melany Darke, Alex Davies, Christina Demetriou, Jamie Downham, Stephanie Farmer, Ruth George, Sophie Grainger, Ashley Dickson, Eulalia Periera, Siofra Petty, Gregory Rikowski, Lisa Robertson, Mandana Vazir, Gwen Webber); and the support of the Viewfinder trustees (Michael Davies, Ashley Dickson and Camilla Halewood).

Thanks also to Jeremy Butler for his painstaking wall repair, to Riikka Kassinen for her beautiful bookbinding and South East Enterprise for their invaluable advice.

Thank you also to exhibition sponsors for supporting our exhibition programme (Breckenridge Design, Exploration Architecture Ltd, Mad Fish Wines, OpenVizor, Regional Neurological Rehabilitation Unit at Homerton Hospital, Signware, Silverprint, We Like Photography, Wines of Chile).

It’s been a privilege both guest curating at the Viewfinder (Marking/Erasing) and becoming the director and curator here, and I look forward with excitement to the upcoming exhibitions and events.

London Independent Photography is a forum for both amateur and professional photographers of nearly 400 members.

Its Greenwich satellite group meets monthly at the Viewfinder, and in this exhibition each member was invited to exhibit one image each.

Amazingness is: ‘The nature, especially in an urban setting, that occurs everyday all around ... easy to miss but always there to be found’.

Marking/Erasing 16.02.08 — 14.03.08

Marking/Erasing explores the relationship between drawing and photography, with one photographer focusing on markmaking, the other on erasing.

Amazingness 31.05.08 — 06.07.08

Nearly Nothing 12.07.08 — 17.08.08

This exhibition rekindles the historic debate as to whether photographers can be considered image makers rather than purely documenters.

The exhibition further questions how much information we need to read an image.

The First Greenwich Annuale 20.08.08 — 25.08.08

Projects include cyanotypes, film of London which has been buried in coffee, and using expired film, all revealing unpredictable results.

Phil Clarke-Hill photographs Lustrabotas, the hundreds of shoe shine boys who work and live on the streets of La Paz, Bolivia. The boys sell a street newspaper, wearing a mask while doing so to protect their dignity. These photographs operate both as social documentary and art photography.

Not Performing 29.08.08 — 28.09.08

Lustrabotas 04.10.08 — 02.11.08

DestinAsian 06.11.08 — 16.11.08

An exhibition exploring the increasingly blurred boundaries between the performed and the natural, and between the theatre and the everyday.

Photographs illustrating journeys to and from the Indian subcontinent, themes of migration and identity, or the evolution of Asian culture from the traditional to the multicultural.

Peculiar Processes 22.11.08 — 04.01.09

An inventory is prepared of objects and locations required to recreate the dream fragments.

‘One At A Time’ poignantly observes the dynamics and emotional hierarchy within single parent families.

Projects include photoshoots of dancersat Laban and performance by Shaun Caton.

Open Salon 2009 10.01.09 — 01.02.09

This exhibition saw 200+ diverse photographs exhibited – anyone could bring a photograph, on any subject, from any genre; from a portfolio or from a bedroom wall; by professional photographers or by first timers.

Picture the Moment 06.02.09 — 22.02.09

24:2009 25.02.09 — 19.03.09

Every year since 2004, between the hours of midnight New Year’s Eve and midnight New Year’s Day, 24 photographers each seek to capture the essence of their one hour; the economic, social, environmental, political and very personal reflections on a moment in our lives.

Dreams 27.03.09 — 19.04.09

Painterly Photographs 24.04.09 — 17.05.09

Each series presented in ‘Painterly Photographs’ shares a painterly approach, but comprise strikingly different images.

One at the Time 20.05.08 — 31.05.08

School Run 05.06.09 — 14.06.09

The exhibition highlights how our repetitive routes can throw up beauty and intrigue every day, and how a local environment can differ greatly from day to day.

marking/eRasing Essay by Pedro Vicente Photographers: Claire Davidson Julia Mariscal

Everything is in motion, everything is changing, everything is being transformed and yet nothing changes.

Jean Baudrillard When Louise Forrester, curator of Marking/Erasing, asked me to write a small text for this exhibition’s catalogue I realised I did not know anything about the two artists in the exhibition, neither did I know anything about the project. I couldn’t say anything rather than yes.

Drawing, performative, photography, image-making tool, erasing, making, movement, physicality, stillness, perception, presence, creativity, mechanical, chance, spontaneity, temporality, visibility, remove, document, process, loss, repetition, alteration, lack, difference, iterability, reaction, evidence, narrative, abstract, stillness, enactment, scene, indexicality, existence, self-consciousness, impulse, being, language, trace, reference, response, erosion, tension, metaphorical, effect, marking, authenticity, event, reality, bodily, projection, intimacy, instant, absence.

I don’t want to write the traditional catalogue’s essay.

Some theory at the beginning (with some quotes of French theorists if possible), then a remake of some thoughts, an historical approach and to finish some deep thinking about what the works on show might, or might not, means. But I guess it is what Louise is expecting… So, I think I should give it a try.

Photography and painting, one could even say drawing in this context, have been used by artists who have had much to say about notions of time, perspective, representation and veracity, and who use their medium conceptually to enhance their ideas. Nowadays, the conversation between painting and photography is richer, deeper, and more utterly captivating than it has

ever been before. On one hand, for Jean Baudrillard, the miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world.

It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens (objectif). Analysis and reproduction (ressemblance) are of no help in solving this problem. The technique of photography takes us beyond the replica into the domain of the trompe l’oeil.

On the other hand, it seems that painting for Baudrillard is unreal, emptied out, without atmosphere, as if it came from another shore (venue d’un autre littoral).

It has an irradiating light which preserves the power of black and white contrasts, even when colours are used. The characters, their faces, the landscapes are projected into a light that is not theirs. They are violently illuminated from outside, like strange objects, and by a light which announces the imminence of an unexpected event. They are isolated in an aura which is both extremely fluid and distinctly cruel.

It is not working. I could try a more historical approach perhaps, something more didactic and amusing...

Art begins with resistance to loss; or so the ancients supposed. Caius Plinius Secundus, (AD 23-AD 79), better known as Pliny the Elder, writer, natural philosopher and naval and military commander, attributes the origins of art to a drawing. On a chapter on sculpture in his Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder narrates the history of a Corinthian Maid, Diboutades of Sicyon, who traces, on a surface, the shadow of her departing lover, a Roman soldier being deployed abroad. By placing a light source in front of the soldier, Diboutades creates a profile of her lover’s head, from which her father Butades, later, builds his relief: ‘Placing a lamp in front of the young man she drew

around the profile cast on the wall behind. Butades then pressed clay onto the silhouette to produce a relief of the young man’s face,’ Pliny the Elder writes.

The story of the Corinthian Maid in particular was widely depicted during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting the fashion for drawing among women of sensibility, while also perhaps suggesting that mere mechanical imitation was all an amateur – for which read female – artist could hope to achieve in the medium. The Maid’s use of a cast shadow as a template was, after all, in one sense a mechanical or even a kind of industrial process (her father came along later and filled in her drawing with terracotta).

Although in this simple scene the complex nature of the genesis of drawings is not discussed by Pliny, nevertheless, it seems to offer already all the elements to structure its question: the reality/virtuality of the object; an object of which the drawing is a projection; and the virtuality/reality of the drawing itself. More specifically the legend serves to highlight the distance that occurs between a sign and its referent. In Diboutades’ case the invention of drawing is initiated by removal and separation so that it immediately speaks of a loss and of a mimetic substitution. The implications of this are immediately apparent in the fact that this origin has two distinct components: the first being the projection and initial recording by Diboutades, and the second being the point at which Butades makes this recording permanent with clay. This genesis also contains an inevitability of loss, and death.

Butades records (draws) the profile of his daughter’s lover so that she doesn’t need to forget both who he is, and who he was – a condition concerned with place and time, motivated by the prospect of his loss. Without

this drawing the soldier suffers an inevitable death at his new posting, a death through posting. Represented in this way the soldier is relegated to an act of memory, but this too is dissolution, a separation through time and space. The relief of the soldier is, in fact, a death mask.

No, not working either. Maybe if I write about photography and its performativity…

The very first thing we do before a photograph is to look for the narrative, the story, the argument.

Paradoxically, what constitutes the true essence of any photograph is what is hidden or is not shown, what is left for our interpretation and imagination. This is where photography’s performativity resides – in how we perceive it.

The genuine meaning of a photograph comes from our own cultural knowledge; a photograph invites us to be self-conscious of what we see, how we see it and why we see what we see. Thus, a photograph acquires its significance from its place within the very large system of social and cultural codes that are part of our collective memory. The perception of an image, paraphrasing Henri Bergson, is never a mere contact of our mind with the photograph; it is impregnated with ‘memory-images’ (knowledge we already have) which complete the image as they interpret it. In other words, a photograph is not only a photograph but also an erratic multitude of remembered elements (cultural and social codes, images, cultural knowledge, etc.) which finalise the photograph. As Bergson says, ‘every perception is already memory; practically, we perceive only the past’. Certainly, there is a clear connection between a photograph and memory. Not ‘memory past’, but ‘memory-present’. A memory we recall in the very moment of perceiving the photograph, when

it becomes present again. And there is where the performativity of the photograph is, in what it does on us.

No, no, no. I might look at the work of Claire Davidson and Julia Mariscal. The artists’ work, after all, is what it is important...

Photography (re)produces, it (re)produces anything, an event, a condition of a subject rather than the subject itself. Davidson and Mariscal’s images encapsulate actions; they are themselves an event, a condition of their subjects.

What is important in Davidson and Mariscal’s work is not what is represented, not what we see but what we don’t see. Not what is shown but the way in which their photographs introduce and use different elements, which prevent the photographs from being fully completed just by themselves. Davidson and Mariscal’s photographs need our participation to be complete.

They force us to think twice about what we see, and there, in our intellect, they are finally finished and fulfilled. That demand of participation impedes them to be still, to be dead or represent death objects. Their images are ‘Still-Alive’.

Once we have examined Davidson and Mariscal’s photographs we don’t have to look at them again, we just have to think of and about them. They are installed and anchored in our minds with their complex simplicity. Their photographs are not made only to be seen; they are also made to be thought, meditated and performed and, therefore, to be, in all senses, contemplated. That is precisely why these images are so extraordinary: they are created to be performed and concluded in our minds.

And it is there where Davidson and Mariscal’s photographs in truth work, not on the paper, but within our intellectual engagement. They are thinking and reflecting instruments, metamorphoses of ideas, thoughts and fictional realities in images. Davidson and Mariscal’s photographs are, as certainly photography is, not only about what we see; but, and perhaps more importantly, about what we do not see.

I give up.

Just look at and enjoy these photographs. They are a visual pleasure and, like the best images, don’t need any support from any weak and confusing words.

amazingness Essay by Cate Trotter Photographer: Anna Hillman

Amazingness (noun) The nature, especially in an urban setting, that exists every day, all around ... easy to miss, but always there to be found. The word ‘amazingness’ isn’t yet in the dictionary, but if it was, Anna Hillman’s definition might be this. Amazingness sums up her ongoing project to help people see some of the most beautiful pieces of nature in the urban world. Taken on local walks and explorations around where she lives and works, the series shows plants poking through concrete cracks, paint peeling from window frames and the rhythmic watermark patterns along river walls. Hillman shows us not only the beauty of the biological world of plants and bacteria, but also the physical world of light and shade and the chemical world of decay and oxidisation.

The Amazingness project tackles sustainability at its root: the pictures are a call to action, inspiring us to interact with our urban environment and to give it the appreciation and value that it deserves.

The one thing that is unstoppable, however, is nature itself. Plants will always find a way to break through concrete and grow in smog-filled cities, sunlight will always create moving patterns through meshed wire fences. The images make us realise that we are striving for sustainability not for nature’s sake, but our own.

Hillman’s pictures prove that nature will thrive no matter what we do.

The fact that nature cannot be stopped is also the reason why Hillman is compelled to record these moments in photographs. Every image depicts a once-in-a-lifetime moment, never to be repeated because the sun will have shifted, the leaves will be blown into a new formation or the colour of a flower will have changed. Locations are often revisited and documented again to highlight changes that

are often left unappreciated.

Rhythm, pattern and colour run through all of Hillman’s work. In the Amazingness project, this is the process that turns figurative forms into abstract shapes, showing us that the world never needs to be seen solely for its function. Delight can be found in visual forms alone.

These pictures are the starting point of a much bigger project to find amazingness for ourselves. She runs workshops to get children and adults in the habit of exploring their environments, and is inviting you to take part, too, by contributing your own pictures to be displayed alongside hers. Little by little, she is helping us discover the small pieces of wonder and delight that surround us in our everyday lives.

Hillman sits alongside sustainable design experts Ezio Manzini and Alastair Fuad-Luke as a member of SlowLab. This global collective encourages us to enjoy more by slowing down – by immersing ourselves fully in our activities and environments, we become more aware and appreciate life to its full potential.

Amazingness defines a specific way in which SlowLab’s philosophy can be brought to life.

One day, we may see ‘amazingness’ listed in the dictionary, but it could never be appreciated this way. It is something that only exists when we experience it for ourselves – with this in mind, it is time for this passive education to come to an end, and to let our new life in the urban wonderland begin.

Nearly nothing Essay by Dominic Paterson Photographers: Mark Bellingham Gerd Hasler Kelly Hill Jockel Liess Hamish Pringle Nicola Probert Isidro Ramirez Gregor Stefan Mike Whelan

“I know of few things in the range of science more gratifying than the gradual appearance of the picture on the blank sheet, especially the first time the experiment is witnessed.”

Talbot, Literary Gazette, 19th February 1841 At first sight the work featured in Nearly Nothing might seem to be too divergent, too particular, or too (wilfully) obscure to have much purchase on the photographic per se. Whether by courting chance, by ‘documenting’ a place from long distance so it remains essentially unknown, by exploiting techniques of post-production more against the clarity of the image than for it, or through other such conceits, the photographers shown here negate many of our expectations of photography, even of photography as art. I want to suggest, however, that it might well be possible to read these varied practices as collectively addressing the contemporary ontology of photography.

Of necessity, such a reading must be situated historically, and this text will recollect key moments in photographic history: its ‘origin’, its popularisation, the appropriation of its vernacular style by conceptual artists of the ‘60s as a move against traditional aesthetics, and also its putative disappearance at the hands of digital media. Each of these moments can be read with, and through, the frame provided by Nearly Nothing.

There is precedent for hanging big claims about the photographic on a few specific and unlikely photographs, as the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, still the touchstones of most photography theory, amply demonstrate. These writers remain essential because they both establish richly nuanced accounts of photography that acknowledge and celebrate its ambiguities, be they aesthetic, epistemological or political.1 In the epigraph

above, Talbot admits he cannot yet, in 1839, ascertain the limits of photography.

Indeed, such is the intrinsic ambiguity of the photographic, that we are perhaps not much closer to being able to do so. Photography itself remains wonderfully opaque, and Nearly Nothing foregrounds this opacity. In exposing the contingencies which underwrite each photograph, in playing on the boundaries of the legible image, in occupying the space between photograph as artifice and photograph as document, it also brings into focus the historical ontology of the photographic as a set of practices profoundly connected to technological and ideological changes. In doing so, it asks us to consider what we are looking at, and looking for, in photography.

Anyone who has developed their own film or made their own prints – anyone who has waited for a Polaroid image to emerge, for that matter – can easily understand Talbot’s enthusiasm for the magical appearance of the photographic image, seemingly out of nothing.

Nor is it difficult to imagine how much more remarkable this appearance must have seemed in 1839.

As Talbot himself put it: “A person unacquainted with the process, if told that nothing of all this was executed by the hand, must imagine that one has at one’s call the Genius of Aladdin’s Lamp. And indeed, it may almost be said, that this is something of the same kind. It is a little bit of magic realised: – of natural magic.”2 Magical or not, photography’s own inception might best be thought of as a ‘gradual appearance,’ an emergence rather than an instant flash of invention. 3 Though it is frequently traced to Louis Daguerre’s dramatic announcement on 7th January 1839 of his success in making daguerreotypes, there are multiple claims for there being earlier beginnings.

One of these is made on behalf of Nicéphore Niépce, who produced what is widely acknowledged as the first permanent photograph at Gras, near Chalon-surSaône, around 1826.4 The photograph, which is blurred and hard to read, records the view from a window in Niépce’s estate; it was left in the care of the Royal Society in London in 1828, without causing undue excitement, until its rediscovery in 1952. 5 Perhaps the obvious limitations of Niépce’s process and the resulting image – including the fact that it was indistinct (requiring an eight hour exposure), and non-reproducible (being a direct positive) – outweighed the visual impact this photograph possessed.

Nonetheless, it was Niépce’s work which would lead directly to Daguerre’s announcement. Another such claim is Talbot’s, and because his process made possible the production of multiple prints – surely a defining feature of the photographic as we now understand it – it carries considerable weight. Perhaps the world’s first negative was made by Talbot at his home Lacock Abbey in August 1835.

Produced with a camera obscura, it depicted a latticed window, and was later mounted and captioned as follows: “when first made, the squares of glafs [sic] about 200 in number could be counted, with the help of a lens.”6 The documentary detail of this image, and its connection to empirical observation, were thus underscored, as was its material fragility – for even four years after its creation the image was already becoming indistinct.

For Talbot, like the other pioneers of photography, going back to Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy in the first years of the 19th century, a central problem was how to stop the ‘photogenic’ process and thus make durable images; that is, ones not subject to a return to nothingness.

Without such an arresting of photosensitivity, the very light which allowed the photograph to be visible to the observer contributed to its eventual disappearance.

Photography, then, might be said to be constituted by two moments of arrest: the first being the fixing of a focused image, the second the fixing of the process which makes the first moment possible. The camera obscura provided the technical apparatus for focusing an image, and the basic chemistry underpinning photography was also known by the early 19th century; it is only when these techniques were consolidated to make images both legible and enduring that the photographic as we know it began to emerge.7 Talbot was well enough aware of this. In a letter of 2nd February 1839, subsequently published in the Literary Gazette, he explained the characteristic aspects of the ‘new art’ of photography. It established a qualitative break with the camera obscura and camera lucida because “it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself. All that the artist does is to dispose the apparatus before the object whose image he requires: he then leaves it for a certain time, greater or less, according to circumstances. At the end of the time he returns, takes out his picture, and finds it finished.”

The idea that photographs are made without artistic intervention is the cornerstone of the claim for their dual status as both gratifying and scientific, as Talbot’s epigraph to this text has it. Talbot presented his photograph of the latticed window as just such an unmediated production: “this I believe to be the first instance on record, of a house having painted its own portrait.”However, “it is not sufficient that the paper should be so sensitive as to receive the impressions of external objects; it is requisite also, that, having received them, it should retain them; and, moreover,

that it should be insensible with regard to other objects, to which it may be subsequently exposed.

The necessity of this is obvious, for otherwise new impression would be received, which would confuse and efface the former ones.”8 It is a nice historical irony that artists and photographers have found it desirable, perhaps even necessary, to welcome confusion and effacement into the practice of making photographs.

The images of Nearly Nothing demonstrate as much.

Without entirely dispensing with the magic of picturing, without passing entirely from the documentary to the abstract, from the unmediated and indexical to the digitally contrived, they deploy oblique strategies to ‘unfix’ the image, as it were, to keep it in the indeterminate space of emergence or disappearance where it can’t be reduced to either positivist clarity or aesthetic gratification.

Peter Osborne convincingly argues that we cannot ground any definition of photography in terms of mediumspecificity. Rather, it is in the historical unfolding of its uses that such a definition is to be located. For Osborne, “the question of the unity of the photographic is the question of the ongoing sociohistorical process of unification of the photographic as a cultural form.

There is a technological basis to this unification – a particular history of technological relations – but it is their meanings-in-use that determine the (necessarily ‘cultural’) unity of these technologies.”9 If the photographic depends essentially on meanings in use then its emergence cannot be thought of as occurring only with pioneers such as Niépce, Talbot or Daguerre, but must also be located in the dissemination of photographic image-making to a mass public.

By the late-19th century photography was no longer dependent on the cumbersome equipment and professional

expertise that accompanied its initial growth, and thus it could make this shift, becoming the defining imageculture of modernity. The first small portable camera produced by Kodak in 1888 was marketed with the famous slogan ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’10 Thus it was by minimising the public’s involvement in the photographic process that it became a public form. With the establishment of an amateur and vernacular use of photography, the photographic in Osborne’s sense emerges fully.

In our own era, digital technology raises the question of the limits of photography’s ‘expanding field.’

Though Osborne’s definition of the photographic is elastic enough to include digital, others are less convinced. To bring the historical narrative full circle, Tacita Dean’s 2006 film Kodak presents an elegy of analogue photography, documenting the last days of film production at a Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, the very birthplace of Niépce’s ‘first photograph.’

For Dean this moment is emblematic of a general disappearance of the photographic, understood literally as ‘writing with light’, in the face of digital imaging with its fundamentally different processes and visual properties.11 Polaroid’s decision in February of this year to end its film production seems to drive the last nail in the coffin of the popular manifestations of analogue photography, with its dependence on a series of material processes and its defining endpoint in the print.

In the digital era, technological aids to image production abound, but images which don’t make the grade are likely to disappear without trace, deleted at the push of a button without ever seeing the light of day. In contrast, the unfixed image serves as a metaphor for the emergence and the disappearance

of the photographic, but also as an emblem of its special, spectral poetics, and for the way in which this confounds modernist purity and medium-specificity.

For conceptual artists of the 1960s and ‘70s it was precisely this antithetical relation to a narrowly defined ‘pure’ modernism which made photography attractive. Photoconceptualism negates several aspects of photography as art: pictorialism, the signature authorial style, the well-made print, are all displaced by a turn to informal, vernacular, non-high art modes. This is achieved by a turn to the documentary, though even here a negation is effected – the decisive moment, as it were, having occurred well in advance of the shutter’s click, at the moment when a certain procedure was decided upon.

In a brilliant analysis of this historical moment, Jeff Wall argues that we should understand the conceptual use of the photographic as fundamentally ambiguous rather than purely negating. Though inspired by logics of reductivism and de-skilling which had developed in other branches of art practice, photo-conceptualism, in Wall’s view, retains a link to picturing essential to all photography. The work of Huebler, Smithson, Dan Graham and others can thus be seen to enact “the fusion, or even confusion, of tropes of art-photography with aspects of its critique. Far from being anomalous, this fusion reflects precisely the inner structure of photography as potentially avant-garde or even neoavant- garde art.”12 On Wall’s account, then, photo-conceptualism does not negate photography, but reveals its complexity.

In the photographic work of Bruce Nauman, for example, which uses either rough black-and-white to document performances, or more elaborately staged studio-lit colour shots to make visual puns, we find that the two styles, “reduced to a set of basic formulae and effects,” have become “signifiers for the new

coexistence of species of photography which had seemed ontologically separated and even opposed in the art history of photography up to that time. It is as if the reportage works go back to Muybridge and the sources of all traditional concepts of photographic documentary, and the colour pictures to the early “gags” and jokes, to Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, to the birthplace of effects used for their own sake. The two reigning myths of photography – the one that claims that photographs are “true” and the one that claims they are not – are shown to be grounded in the same praxis […].”13 The crucial point is that the photographic cannot be reduced to either one of these myths: consequently neither naïve credulity nor detached cynicism can fully apprehend photographs. There are plenty of examples of the former which serve as cautionary tales in the history of photography. One notable example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s publication in 1922 of ‘The Coming of the Fairies’, which contained photographs of “beautiful and luminous creatures” – photographs eventually revealed in 1983 as the work of two schoolgirls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.14 Yet Conan Doyle’s credulity had complex roots, and though his best-known creation, Sherlock Holmes, is a byword for empirical observation and sceptical rationality, Conan Doyle himself was a convinced Spiritualist.

His belief in all kinds of Spiritualist phenomena – from ectoplasm to séances – was repeatedly challenged by his friend Harry Houdini, who exposed all the tricks of the trade without shifting Conan Doyle in the least. Indeed, he merely argued that Houdini himself had magical powers. Perhaps this is because the stakes in seeing evidence of the supernatural were so high for Conan Doyle, who had lost a son in WWI. In the Spiritualist boom following the war a number

of photographs were produced claiming to show manifestations of life beyond death – including the appearance of dead soldiers. The spectral quality of the photograph – again a topos thoroughly explored

by Barthes and Benjamin – was here put to exploitative ends.

There is no reason to believe, however, that demythologisation is less naïve. Images That Lie, an exhibition at the Museum of Communication in Bern, Switzerland, presents a plethora of manipulated, edited or faked news photos. The message of the exhibition is paradoxically reassuring – it implies that the ‘original’ photograph provides a true picture of reality, which is only distorted by external intervention or manipulation, whether by erasures, additions, cropping and so on.

It was precisely this notion that the photograph itself, as an image which ‘makes itself’, was a transparent vehicle of truth that Roland Barthes targeted in his 1961 essay ‘The Photographic Message’, where he argued that photographs, despite appearances, were connotative all the way down.15 Again, we can underscore the way in which the photograph possesses an ambivalence with regard to binaries like fact and fiction. By producing images through particularised processes, and often by withholding visual information, the photographers in this exhibition ask us to look beyond conventional ways of reducing the photograph to either truth or fiction, either aesthetics or empirical reality.

For instance, Mark Bellingham’s aleatoric images prise apart the identification, central to the idea of photographic authorship, of the camera’s lens with the artist’s vision. In doing so they prevent us from evading our own constitutive role in supplying meaning to an image (or deciding on its absence). Barthes’s oft-quoted formulation has it that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the

author.”16 We should take note of precisely what this means – it is not just that the author drops away out of the picture, but that a qualitatively new form of reading is constituted through that absence.

This ‘reborn’ reader is characterised as someone open to the play of signification, but also someone who takes responsibility for their own aesthetic responses and for their judgements. A crucial dimension of both Benjamin’s and Barthes’s responses to photography is their insistence on the embodied character of our relation to it. For Benjamin this is a question of the individual and collective ‘innervation’ of technology which opens the possibility of a revolutionary use and dissemination of images.17 In a 1933 text on mimesis he asks “whether we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its transformation.”18 Miriam Hansen notes that “it is in light of this question that Benjamin explores the aesthetic – formal, stylistic, perceptual, experiential – possibilities of the technological media…”19 One key dimension of Benjamin’s answer to this question lies in the notion of the ‘optical unconscious’ first introduced in his 1931 ‘Little History of Photography’.

As Hansen explains “this term refers to the idea that the apparatus might record and store aspects of reality invisible to the unarmed human eye, or moments of contingency and indeterminacy that were neither perceived nor intended by the photographer but might at some later point be released to the searching gaze of the beholder.”20 Photography, along with cinema, holds open the possibility, central to Benjamin’s utopian thinking, of a playful reception of technology to be set against the catastrophic reception which had already taken place. Such play might well include, as it does in Nearly Nothing, the turning of contingency against the very apparatus that records it.

For Barthes the embodied response to photographs is figured through the much-discussed notion of the ‘punctum’ in certain images that can ‘pierce’ the viewer.

Photography is not only touched by the world (as an indice of it), Barthes argues, but also touches the viewer. This effect can be particularly strong in images which draw the viewer in by holding back the legibility of what is pictured.

A remarkable staging of this effect is Jeff Wall’s ‘Night’ (2001), a black-and-white image seemingly so dark that the gradual recognition of the intense detail in the image is startling. The appearance of the picture’s content happens as though it were developing in front of (or even in) one’s eyes. Perhaps, Briony Fer says in a close-reading of ‘Night’, “the processes of perceptual recognition are somehow clearest when they are failing, when twilight dims and falls.”21 A photograph which is hard to read can force the question of the competence of our own viewing, but also of our presumption that the camera’s lens is fundamentally or phenomenologically aligned with our seeing. Again, the work in Nearly Nothing can be seen as speaking to these issues. For instance, by using and abusing the technological measures which elide the contingencies and mistakes of photographs and bring them into line with normative expectations, Gregor Stephan’s overexposed and ‘corrected’ images reveal the artificiality of this alignment.

In Antonioini’s ‘Blow Up’ (and in recent political events in the UK) we are presented with the idea of the photograph as an endlessly detailed and legible world – a nearly everything. Here the empirical, documentary side of photography shades into its complicity with surveillance, policing, and with what Michel Foucault termed ‘power/ knowledge’. 22 Several writers on photography have pursued a Foucauldian line of inquiry, looking at the various

projects for representing, knowing, and thus subjugating the ‘others’ of the Western imaginary – from colonial peoples to the criminal and the insane. 23 Foucault’s own most interesting writing on photography comes in an essay written for his friend Gerard Fromanger, whose photorealist paintings spurred the philosopher to an idiosyncratic account of the history of photography, markedly different from the critiques of representation inspired by his work on power. 24 In phrases noticeably informed by the laudatory tone of the essay, Foucault evokes the heterotopic impurity of photography before modernism claimed it as a medium. In the mid-19th century, Foucault argues, “there existed a shared practice of the image, accessible to all, on the borders of photography and painting, which was to be rejected by the puritan codes of art in the 20th century.”25 That modernism, with its demand for medium-specificity, militated against this practice, had deleterious consequences in Foucault’s view, for in neglecting the pleasures of the image it handed it over to agencies of power. In contrast, the “frenzy for images” Foucault celebrates, engendered “a new freedom of transposition, displacement, and transformation, of resemblance and dissimulation, of reproduction, duplication and trickery of effect.”26 Foucault thus describes a ludic space between photography’s emergence and its commercialisation, a space in which it is gloriously impure. As with Barthes and Benjamin, then, we find in Foucault’s writing a nuanced, and at least latently dialectical, understanding of photography’s essential ambiguity.

1. The work included in Nearly Nothing calls to mind questions about photography’s emergence, as well as about its possible disappearance at the hands of digital imaging, because it plays on a series of ambiguities which have defined photographic history. These include its aesthetic/ empirical; documentary /ideological, representational/abstract, mediated/ direct, and modern/postmodern, amongst others. It reveals photography as an extended field of practice, a ‘postmedium’ par excellence, contingent on processes which expose the making and the reception of its images to all kinds of uncertainties.

By tarrying with nothingness it recalls the first photographs – not in the sense of returning to the plenitude of an origin, but in the way in which it suggests that photography remains unfixed. Peter Osborne suggests that the “ontology of the photographic image” depends on the “unity of the relational totality of the variety of different photographic forms coexisting within the present: chemical photography, film, television, video and digital imaging […] the spine, if you like, of a still expanding field.”27 The indeterminacies poetically displayed in Nearly Nothing reveal this expansion as an ongoing process: a positive condition, rather than a cause for concern. The canonical texts of each themselves manifest this ambiguity, presenting complex, and at times seemingly contradictory accounts of photography. Recent scholarship has emphasised the need to think through the deployment of such contradictory concepts.

See, for instance, Jay Prosser’s chapter on Barthes in Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

2. Talbot, letter to William Jerden, 2nd February 1839. The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, Document 3782, archived at http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk.

3. ‘Emergence’ here recalls Michel Foucault’s use of the term, following Nietzsche, in place of the singular ‘origin.’ See Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in James Faubion (ed.) Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 369-391.

4. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd edition, (London: Lawrence King, 2006), p. 11.

5. Geoffrey Batchen notes that this image, made on a pewter plate coated with Bitumen of Judea, was itself almost impossible to photograph successfully, and that the ‘first photograph’ as reproduced in books is in fact a copy print extensively touched up with watercolour. As he puts it “It seems that wherever we look for photography’s bottom line, we face this strange economy of deferral, an origin always preceded by another, more original, but never-quite present photographic instance.” Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography, (London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 127.

6. Geoffrey Batchen offers a rich reading of this image in Sophie Howarth (ed.) Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs, (London: Tate, 2005), pp. 15-21.

7. In fact as early as 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze had discovered the

photo-sensitivity of compounds. On the complex ‘origins’ of photography see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography, (London: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 22-53.

8. Talbot to Jerden, Op. Cit. 9. Peter Osborne Photography in an Expanding Field: Distributive Unity and Dominant Form, in David Green (ed.) Where is the Photograph?, (Brighton: Photoworks, 2003), p.64.

10. Robin Lenman (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 343.

11. Dean has frequently and eloquently insisted on the qualitative difference between analogue and digital. See, for instance, Kodak: Analogue in Rina Carvajal (ed.), Tacita Dean: Film Works, (Milan: Charta, 2007). In a telling historical irony, footage of the destruction of the Kodak factory in 2007 has been posted on Youtube, perhaps the site of the digital image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB_2d8pJ0qA (accessed 21/05/2008). One Youtube user, objecting to this footage, writes “Ce n’est pas un Spectacle...”

12. Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art, in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 148.

13. Ibid., p. 152-153.

14. On the relationship between Houdini and Conan Doyle see Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss, (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), pp. 247-297.

15. Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, Image, Music, Text, (London: Fontana,1977), pp. 15-31.

16. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Ibid, p. 148.

17. See Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, Vol. 62, (Autumn 1992), pp. 3-41.

18. Walter Benjamin, Mimetic Faculty, in Selected Works: 1931-34, Volume 2, Part 2, (London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 721.

19. Miriam Hansen, Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema, October, Vol. 109, (Summer 2004), p. 38.

20. Ibid.

21. Briony Fer, Night, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 30. No. 1, 2007, p. 72.

22. See Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

23. See for instance Allan Sekula, The Traffic in Photographs, Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, Photography and the Scholar/Critic (Spring, 1981), pp. 1525; and The Body and the Archive, October, Vol.39, (Winter, 1986), pp.

3-64.

24. Michel Foucault, Photogenic Painting, in Sarah Wilson (ed.)

Photogenic Painting, (London: Black Dog, 1999), pp. 83-105.

25. Ibid., 88.

26. Ibid., 83.

27. Osborne, Op. Cit., p. 63.

The first Greenwich annuale Introduction by John Levett Photographers: Neville Austin Quentin Ball Nicky Boyd Corin Ashleigh Brown Jenny Johnson Burrows Diego Campos Anita Chandra Natalie Chant Dawn Collins Anne Crabbe Nathalie Crouch Melany Darke Brian Daubney Robert Davies Jenny Dawes Orde Eliason Louise Forrester Anne-Marie Glasheen Tony Hale Anna Hillman Matt Holland Chris Hudson Martin Jordan Sam Kemp Marysia Lachowicz Jennifer Lanier John Levett Stefan Lubomirski de Vaux Dave Mason Michael Rodgers Paula Salischiker David Thorpe Duncan Unsworth John Whitfield

The Greenwich Satellite Group of London Independent Photography came together in May 2007 with the aim of providing an inclusive meeting place where photographers with experience, photographers with none and beginners with nerves (or nerve) could come together in a supporting way to share work finished, work in progress, work that works, work that almost does and work that still needs work.

It’s a group too in which it’s OK to come, sit, look and leave. Or just chat. Some have joined for one meeting, some have come to all; some have come to one meeting and decided we’re not for them; some have come as something to do while passing through London on the way to another place; some are studying hereabouts and some have retired here. Open house.

The Greenwich Annuale (a tongue-in-cheek reference to The Venice Biennale with Viewfinder Gallery acting as our pavilion and the Thames as our Grand Canal!) is a pat on the back to ourselves for coming together as a group, surviving and growing; hence the openness of the show and the photographic diversity on display.

Surprise and confusion; the extraordinary in the ordinary; the street as a theatre; the park as a movie set; the wonder of insignificance; corners of peace; signs of disturbance; scenes hardly seen — if you’re moved to be different, you’d be greatly welcomed to share the difference with us.

not performing Essay by Claire Davidson Responses by the photographers: Tom Coulton Jonathan Goldberg Riikka Kassinen Marta Sanches Costa Holly Stevenson Marie Triller

Not Performing conjures ideas of the real versus the theatrical, the natural and unstaged versus fantasy and fiction. In each of the works in this exhibition, a tension is created between the concept of performing and not performing.

There is an uneasiness in Marta Sanches Costa’s photographs of women caught between the glamorous and mundane. There is both a feeling of an intimate, candid snapshot and a strong sense of the photographer’s impeccable staging and awareness of the theatrical.

The contradiction between the idea of performing and not performing in Tom Coulton’s work is also striking.

The commuters seem to have disengaged their feelings and emotions from their physical bodies. The inner and outer have been disconnected as a defence against the extreme physical invasion of space. At the same time, the disengagement itself is a kind of performance, cutting off as much as possible from the audience, choosing what not to express.

Jonathan Goldberg’s street photographs are undeniably theatrical and yet unstaged for the camera. Are the subjects participating in a kind of ‘natural’ street performance?

Although the photographer plays no part in the staging, to what extent do we all perform in everyday spaces and what is it that makes a scene or experience ‘theatrical’? When do the boundaries between the real and the theatrical become blurred and seem to co-exist?

JG: For me the truth is always stranger than fiction, and that’s what I try to convey in much of my work, especially drawing attention to the quirky and unusual which people don’t automatically see.

HS: Fiction and contemporary culture it could be argued are rowing in the same boat, if one understands culture as being the gloss that covers the detritus of

daily life... Culture often assumes a formal discussion involving the fictionalisation of ‘real’ life.

RK: We all have dreams in and about reality which often manifest themselves as a way of escaping, fantasising and fictionalising the world we live in. Art as such is a great tool to explore that juxtaposition and understand what might be real and natural, fiction and fantasy.

MSC: Should we question the real versus the theatrical or could there be some fantasy in reality too? I find that fiction is a great form of escapism from our daily lives and from routine, bringing us to a new realm of performance.

MT: I am documenting the US/Mexico border situation.

There are two distinctly different realities here, depending on which side of the border you are on. This tranquil scene – three mounted Border Patrol agents within the desert landscape – may appear cinematic when taken out of context like this.

TC: All the world’s a stage and all that. With bodies of work, I personally find that work grounded in a recognisable reality hits me at a deeper level than works of pure fiction or fantasy.

It is also interesting to look at the idea of truth and illusion in relation to photography and the digital age. On one hand we see the photograph as evidence, a document or definitive record of a specific time and place, while at the same time we are aware of the digital image as limitlessly malleable and artificial, grounded in no fixed reality. It is interesting to look at how the photographer’s role fits into this debate and what part that plays in our reading of these images.

JG: On first viewing I felt cheated when I found out Andreas Gursky’s work was all digital manipulation, but then I came to love his work because his images are his interpretation of the world. After all, the photo was

never a definite record of a time and place, it’s only ever been what the photographer chooses to say depending on what is included or omitted in a frame. Only now it’s easier and more widespread to create a different reality within the boundaries of what we still see as a photograph, though it may be more appropriate to define it as digital art.

HS: If a photograph is understood to be as ‘truthful’ as the relationship between its object/sitter and the photographer then truth must be understood not as a digital medium versus a celluloid one but as a principle.

RK: A photograph in its very nature is already a manipulation of reality whether it is a digital or analogue version. The ‘truth’ can be illusion and vice versa. Time is not fixed as such so photographs work as a caption in the flux.

MSC: Photographs are always evidence of something we created. In the digital era, we are able to manipulate images in a different way and create new and different illusions or realities. Even so, I believe that a photograph as evidence is a photographer’s way of seeing the ‘world’.

MT: In many cases, employing a digital camera does not change the photographer’s vision, intent or approach to his/her subject. I hate that tag – manipulated – that is hung on all digital work.

TC: I think it depends on the context of the photograph and how it is meant to be seen. Although in the past the photograph itself was a sign of authenticity, now it seems the digital process is the marker of how real or retouched we perceive a photograph and the reality it depicts.

Many of the artists deal with issues of identity and shifting identities in relation to performing or presenting a character. While Marta Sanches Costa’s images look at

conforming to or deconstructing expected character roles and behavioural norms, Tom Coulton’s work touches on themes of expressing or concealing identities in public and private spaces. Riikka Kassinen explores the theme of identity in depth. In her series, she investigates the photographer from the perspective of the actor rather than the audience. Through the putting on, performing in and taking off of the mask, the ideas of concealing and revealing character and the layering and altering of identities is explored.

JG: I’m interested in how our built environment affects how we behave in public spaces. In our society we are being controlled and monitored increasingly, and blitzed by advertisements. Public spaces where we are more free to express ourselves are being replaced by mega shopping complexes, like the largest one in Europe soon to open in Shepherd’s Bush. I think this will have a detrimental effect on the community around west London, and possibly the West End. HS: Contemporary art often refutes the hypocrisy of the stereotype...

RK: The way society remembers relates closely to different character roles and behaviour mechanism: we identify ourselves in relation to those factors everyday and explore and challenge which are public and private behaviour models and roles.

MSC: I think we all conform to a certain type of behaviour when we are in public spaces. I think in a sense we all play our role in society, but I think that the importance of identity is what makes us unique.

Identity lets us decide how we want to be perceived and what is important to us as individuals.

TC: What interests me is how the boundaries of what people consider public and private varies with each individual and often clash.

The role of the audience is central to the concept of performance. It is fascinating to look at the relationships between photographer and subject, artist and viewer.

What is the role of the viewer’s individual experiences, knowledge and imagination in the interpretation of the image? In Holly Stevenson’s work, the strong reference to a traditional theatre stage places the viewer in an imaginary darkened auditorium in which we are free to suspend our disbelief and be open to the fantasy world she constructs. Marie Triller’s photograph is highly cinematic in its composition, imagery and presentation and highlights the importance of the viewer’s imagination in the reading of the image. Although the photograph is in fact unstaged, the viewer’s familiarity with the genre of the western movie gives a powerful sense of epic drama to the piece.

JG: We are all voyeurs and voyeurism is the essence of street photography. Sometimes I get shouted at, though it’s not my intention to show people in a bad light, and if this happens then I’ll discard the image.

HS: Urm, I don’t think about demographic when I’m making work... Marcel Duchamp said it all about the viewer and I can’t really top his maxim, other than truth needs both imagination and a frame of reference.

Though, Barthes notes that in relation to painting “Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of tableau vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, Vintage). Perhaps in order to re-experience a pleasurable performance from a given photograph, the viewer must feel comfortable with seeing the death of an experience.

RK: We deconstruct and construct images all the time without often thinking about it that much. I think the knowledge of visual languages works like understanding any form of language, the more we

know the more we understand. Obviously there are basic elements that are readable without having a specific knowledge of a certain genre or medium but many times art/photography can seem like a code language that is aimed at a certain audience. I think the artist has all the power to affect and the viewer has the power to interpret that message in whichever way they can or want to.

MSC: The audience is of great importance. We all do work with something in our minds and we hope that that idea comes across, but I’m also curious how an audience interprets my work and about how they relate to it. As a viewer, what I feel when looking at someone’s work is important. However if we understand the reasons behind a certain piece of work, it makes us appreciate it more. I like to believe anyone can benefit from art no matter how advanced their understanding of visual language is.

TC: I always think it’s a mistake if you create work that can only be appreciated by people who have read Barthes and studied Art history. It feels too much like an incestuous love-in. I feel a good body of work can resonate with a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds in a variety of ways. I know it sounds cliched, but a good piece of work should create questions rather than shout answers.

MT: We present the viewer with our images, yet each walks away with their own personal interpretation of what they just viewed, based on their unique lifeexperiences and understandings. Once it’s out there, it’s no longer ours – a body of work takes on a life of its own through the audience experiencing it.

This brings us to the idea of narrative in relation to performing/not performing. As a viewer, we are invited to contextualise Marie Triller’s image in a fiction of our

own creation: the image becomes suspended between an imagined past and future. The theme of time is also present in Holly Stevenson’s work, where a storyline runs through the sequence of images. The stillness of the cardboard figures frozen in the photograph and the reference to tableau vivant, or ‘living picture’ create a complex layering of ideas about the importance of time in the photograph, of motion versus stillness and life versus theatre.

JG: My preferred way of showing and viewing photography is in book form, a medium which gives the photographer ultimate control over narrative through repeated imagery in a considered order. Even with single images I like to convey and look for narratives.

HS: Barthes argues that he prefers photography to film... The stillness of photography is peculiar and deserves consideration. Brilliant photographs, like Renaissance paintings, allow the viewer to read the past, present and future tense involved within a given image.

RK: It is funny when a photograph is called ‘cinematic’ in style, what does that mean?

MSC: I find that narrative is the thread that holds photographs or a film together. I don’t think that one or the other is more relevant...

TC: Motion vs stillness is how I see photography and its relation to the world around us. To me, it is a real joy to rest the eye on one image, being still and taking a break from this hectic environment we live in.

It is fascinating to see the work of these artists presented together under the title, Not Performing. I have only touched on some of the interrelated themes that begin to emerge from this group of images. The potential for crossovers and merging of ideas is vast and I am left excited knowing there is so much more to be explored.

Lustrabotas Introduction by the photographer, Phil Clarke-Hill

Lustrabotas is the name for the hundreds of shoe-shine boys who work and live on the streets of La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and one of the ways this is immediately apparent is the presence of child workers, including on the street. Some are as young as seven years old, but it is seen as normal because it is a poor country, all the family work – it has always been like that.

The boys sell a newspaper to supplement their income from working on the streets. The paper is called Hormigon Armado: Reinforced Concrete, which also means army of ants, when read in reverse. The paper works in a similar way to the Big Issue in the UK. The project aims to be a stepping stone to help them off the street: an alternative to shining shoes.

The paper acts as a voice for the boys, giving them an opportunity to tell their stories of life on the street and get involved taking photographs and writing for the paper.

The process documented in this series of photographs is the daily lives of the boys and the workshops in writing and photography run by Alexis Camacho (project manager / editor) and assisted by myself. The fundamental idea behind the workshops is for the Lustrabotas to become proficient in these skills, in order to make the paper themselves in the future.

The philosophy of Hormigon Armado is to understand the importance of engaging with the subject, getting to know them, working closely with them in order to find out what is important to them: how they tick; and what their hopes and aspirations are for the future.

La Paz is a cold and grey city, high up in the Andes, and adjoined to it is another city, El Alto which is a similar sise and a place with more extreme poverty than La Paz, perched above the capital, overlooking from atop the dusty,

barren Andean mountain range. Life is difficult for many of the 2 million or so (including El Alto) inhabitants at some 3,700m above sea level.

Some of the Lustras live on the streets, others with their families and are still at school, and some have their own bedsits. The photographs are a portrait of their everyday lives. They were so open and enthusiastic about having their photo taken that sometimes to get a natural shot it was necessary to take a step back, and just observe the way they acted around each other.

In many of the photos the boys are wearing balaclavas or masks. It is easy to interpret the masks as sinister, but this is often not the case. The boys wear these masks to hide their identity, as it is seen as a social stigma to be a Lustrabota, working on the streets. There are other theories about the significance of the mask – that it represents a sense of belonging for the boys, as they know that are part of a network – a crew – a solidarity amongst some of the poorest people in society. Some also say it acts as protection from the fumes and dirt from shining shoes all day.

To some, the boys are undignified, dangerous, or invisible; in the same way that homeless people can be to those living a city. But they are working, and although they’re not in an official role, earning a good wage or on the books, they are still providing a service and working a trade, albeit a simple one.

A good example of how Hormigon has helped their situation is Williams. At 21, he has now been a Lustra for over two years. He was once living under a bridge next to the river in La Paz. The river is so polluted that it runs brown constantly and the smell reaches the roadside from underneath the bridge. It is not uncommon to see large quantities of toilet roll, industrial waste and raw sewage flowing directly into the river. Williams lived with others under the bridge, many

of whom sniff glue, take drugs (Bolivia is the second largest cocaine producer after Colombia) and drink heavily. It’s a clichÊd story as it is so common: they fund their habits from theft and robbery. Having little or no direction in their lives, they have been forgotten and written off by society.

Williams however, managed to make a change.

Through becoming a Lustra and subsequently selling the paper and working with Camacho on the project, he has begun to turn things around. It has been some time since he has been drinking and taking drugs and he has a home, a wife and child. He was also keen to learn about photography and took to it well, including taking part in some tuition, learning about composition and natural light. He is like many of the boys, not immune to relapses, but trying to build a life for himself. Hormigon is helping him in that direction.

The current incarnation of the project, now called Colectivo, involves a group of youngsters who were previously on the streets, now working as journalists, photographers and reporters and studying for a qualification in journalism, radio and TV at the Catholic University of La Paz. The photos in this project aim to raise awareness of the lives of the boys, the Hormigon Armado project and others similar schemes. The project strives to reflect the lives that some of the poorest people in the world are living today, suggesting possible moves towards a brighter future for the boys and others in a similar position to them.

DestinAsian Introduction by the guest curators, Dr Meena Khatwa and Lionel Openshaw of Bombay Mix Photographers: Sohail Anjum Kush Badhwar Simon Bowcock Andrew Crighton Saibal Das David Graham Harjinder Grewal Paul Grundy Kelly Hill Abeer Hoque Anita Hotwani Sohrab Hura Fawzan Husain Udit Kulshrestha Gerry McCulloch Samina Mishra Swapan Nayak Sudharak Olwe Pete Pattisson Ben Pipe Kushal Ray Rupert SagarMusgrave Sba Shaikh Shubhangi Singh Alex Stoneman Ffion Wyn Evans Lior Zilberstein

As a rite of passage, many British Asians have made the journey to the Indian sub-continent. It is a spectacle that challenges all the senses – and can be described as ‘chaos that works’. The photographs in this exhibition capture memories that resonate, even for those who haven’t yet visited what was once known as the ‘jewel in the crown’. India and Great Britain share an intertwined, tumultuous history, connected through migratory journeys. This exhibition shows how the push and pull between tradition and modernity is revealed in the process of globalisation.

The show is held alongside other concurrent events at Greenwich Picturehouse and the National Maritime Museum as part of Bombay Mix’s 2008 DestinAsians festival. In keeping with the NMM’s remit, many of the images depict travel, transport and journeys in the broadest sense – both literally and metaphorically. These photographs have been taken on journeys to, from and around the Indian subcontinent – as well as showing the journeys that Asian cultures have taken from their traditional homelands to contemporary, urban and multicultural contexts.

DestinAsian: Viewfinder features submissions from professional and non-professional photographers of various ethnicities from around the world. Thirty pieces from 27 participants – most of whom are themselves of South Asian origin – reveal fascinating personal narratives around themes of identity and migration.

Mirroring the character of the Indian subcontinent, the volume of pictures heavily populates the gallery in a colourful and eclectic way. Some of these include pictures taken from Indian Women: The Roles Revised, an expo organised by the Drik India agency and supported by Majority World in the UK.

We sought to avoid clichéd representations of life in the Indian subcontinent and to present images with an original perspective. We also selected images that address issues that matter to contemporary audiences but in a way that is honest, unpretentious and accessible. Whether they expose the exploitation of the ‘untouchables’, capture the clubbers of Kolkata or stroll with the old ladies of Southall – we hope that these pictures speak for themselves and reflect the reality of everyday lives.

While the show has no specific ‘message’, we also hope in some small way to help celebrate diversity and bolster the fight against racism. This is particularly relevant for us, not only as part of an increasingly globalised culture, but also as part of a vibrant multicultural community in this area of South East London. As the far right rises across Europe and as the crumbling state of the economies of the west accelerate the shift to the east, the depth of our understanding of Asian cultures becomes all the more important.

We were delighted to be able to curate a show at the Viewfinder, as we’ve always loved this bijou gallery on our doorsteps, which we think punches above its weight as a specialised photography space, and we hope you will continue to support it.

Peculiar Processes Interview with the photographer Natalia Skobeeva

by Louise Forrester and Sophie Grainger

Why do you use particular processes?

This is part of my work as an artist; this is how I see the physical appearance of my ideas. My first degree was an MA in History and Archaeology, which has probably helped, as has my interest in historical techniques. I use a lot of different vintage cameras: Lomo cameras, different pinholes, large format cameras and Polaroids.

How do you choose a particular process for a particular series?

The idea and the process are parts of one concept. The process physically supports the idea, but the idea is weaker without the process. For example, with the Timeless series I wanted to speak about timeless female issues and desires, the fragility and uniqueness of every woman. The unique results of the cyanotype process not only helped me to make the concept clearer but also gave the work a timeless and hand-made physical feel.

How do you feel about the element of risk involved?

I believe in the god of photography and am always happy for him to guide me. I enjoy a little unpredictability in my work – it makes it more interesting.

What drew you to more traditional craftsmanship?

In the modern 'picture-perfect' digital age, it's so easy to get a flawless image – just press the button. When I started to develop and print my work, making every possible mistake, it excited me enormously how much work was put into each image to make it perfect. I started to intentionally make the mistakes decades of photographers have made, trying to avoid achieving the perfect image. That's how the London series was born and I got hooked on the idea.

Do you feel hand-crafted objects are unique and therefore treasured more?

I think that by hand-crafting my work I put more of me into it: more feelings, more thoughts, more love and more care.

I spend a lot of time with each of my pieces, therefore each image for me is not made, it is 'born'.

How much do you experiment with each process before making final pieces?

That depends on the series. The London series, for example, started in winter when it was very gloomy and dark, and when my personal life was not at its most sparkling. Then my spirits changed, and so did the chemistry. The final series is bright and colourful, with a very positive feel to it.

Which process have you enjoyed the most?

Currently it's Set Loose, where I shot a film in London on sightseeing locations and then buried it in coffee: different sorts, different temperatures and different times. It was such fun. I have been working on it for almost a year already, perfecting the look and the feel of the series.

Have any experimental processes ever gone wrong?

Not really, but there were some unexpected results.

Do you feel there is a right or wrong in producing your work?

No, I try to keep my mind free from prejudice, not follow common rules, and see the work as it is, unbiased. It helps me to find my path within each process.

Do you ever bring peculiar processes into your commercial photographic work?

Not often. However, I have been shooting London Fashion Week for four seasons, and I did use some very experimental techniques there, including hand-developed long exposures, with very interesting results. I'd like to see it happen more.

open Salon 2009 ‘From the Independent Solon to the Collective Salon: Spatial Ideologies in Selective and Open Exhibitions’ Essay by Lisa Robertson Photographers: 200+

In 2005, when Marc Spiegler questioned the critic’s relevance in his article ‘Do Art Critics Still Matter?’, he also heralded the widening sphere of curatorial responsibility.

The day Harold Szeemann left the Kunsthalle Bern to curate independently, “the wind turned against criticism”.1 In the past 50 years, the success of the independent curator, Spiegler argues, has eroded the power of art criticism.

While it would seem, then, that curators’ adopted responsibilities might sustain professional survival, the field has been faced with its own identity crisis. In print at the time of this essay’s publication are two editorials that nicely frame the debates: The Art Newspaper foregrounds the ‘Reassuring Rise of the Curator’ after two decades of obsession with an MBA vision of museums; while at the more polemical end of the spectrum, ArtLies contributes equally to the abounding aphorisms that it criticises, and announces ‘The Death of the Curator’.

Efforts to define the nature of this crisis have produced the very phenomenon curators today struggle to avoid: classification and categorisation. In fact, the sterile, whitewalled environment we recognise as the appropriate venue in which to display art nicely represents the ideology of their resistance.

In his important work ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space’, Brian O’Doherty suggests that the development of abstraction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries quite literally broke the picture frame. As famously represented by Pietro Antonio Martini’s Salon of 1785, the Royal Academy and the École des Beaux-Arts exhibited a mosaic of heavy frames that defined each picture as a self-contained entity “because space was discontinuous and categorisable.”2

An increasing shallowness of the picture plane, augmented by a casually-chosen subject, suggested the frame did not contain an illusory real image but rather a literal space of invented forms; the frame was merely a grouping of parentheses.

Modern painting, O’Doherty argues, declares occupancy by entertaining a dialogue with the wall on which it hangs – otherwise it would create “a single perceptual field [that distracts] from the uniqueness established by each canvas.”3 This championing of artistic vision and of a work of art’s ‘uniqueness’ corresponds to the independent status of the auteurcurator. Collaborative projects and a dialectical model of curating, however, have the ability to produce something more interesting than individual artistic intention. The open exhibition challenges the authorial model of curating by presenting an ideological challenge to the white cube aesthetic.

Unlike its more institutional counterparts, which are typically juried or invitational, the open exhibition displays each submitted work. In this very basic sense, the sheer volume of submissions presents spatial challenges that can be easily avoided in selective shows. One of the most famous open exhibitions, The Times Square Exhibition (1980), organised by New York’s Collaborative Projects Inc, solved this problem by displaying the work in a warehouse in the city’s entertainment district. The politically-spirited group, which at the time had upwards of 40 members, curated the show collectively.

These days, empty warehouses are somewhat difficult to come by, and it’s therefore necessary for galleries that hold open exhibitions to be spatially inventive.

At the Viewfinder Photography Gallery’s 2006 Open Salon, the walls were covered floor to ceiling, not unlike Martini’s painting. Keeping in mind O’Doherty’s

conjecture – that abstraction has meant that artworks occupy space beyond the edges of the picture plane – how does the return to a crowded gallery wall at an open exhibition challenge the institutional conventions of modern art?

O’Doherty believes that the frame provided a very necessary “oxygen tank” that made it possible for paintings to hang like sardines. This argument is, of course, nicely constructed to anticipate the emergence of mid-20thcentury debates about how much space a painting requires in order to ‘breathe’. We can conceive, then, that if a work of art occupies space beyond the boundaries of its picture plane – and this is no longer contained by the physical limits of the composition – that works enter into dialogue with each another.

Nina Othen, curator of Viewfinder’s 2006 Open Salon, comments that because she was dealing with 150 photographers, rather than one, her responsibility was somewhat diluted and, as a result, easier. “When putting exhibitions together,” she explains, “the responsibility has to lie somewhere – sometimes with the artist, or the gallery, or sometimes both. This was a nice change of dynamic from that.

“During the exhibition, so many networks formed between photographers and the gallery, between their friends... [and] it built of a kind of community spirit.” In this sense, the curator’s individual responsibility dissipates, and rather than an expression of the independent auteur’s solitary artistic vision, the exhibition encourages a dialectical model of curating. The dialogue includes not only the artist(s) and the gallery – but also the viewer, whose input is solicited by the “perceptual field” that O’Doherty believed to diminish individual artworks.

In reflecting on this year’s Greenwich Annuale, Louise Forrester, curator of the Viewfinder’s 2009 Open

Salon, comments that with 34 photographers it took a concerted effort to prevent “a landscape wall from emerging, or worse, an ‘ethnic’ wall, or a red wall, so that the exhibition hung together as one rather than as several mini-exhibitions.” For this reason, although the idea has been entertained in the past, the Viewfinder’s Open Salon has not introduced restrictions in either the form or content of submitted works. Introducing a theme would abbreviate the “mutterings”, to use O’Doherty’s term, that emerge between individual works of art and from the exhibition as a whole. “Of course there will be some prevalent themes within the work brought in,” Forrester adds, “but I’d hope that visitors will notice those gradually rather than be presented with shoehorned sections of work.”

At the Open Salon, viewers are invited to evaluate work and invent meaning. In discussing the 2006 Open Salon at Viewfinder, Othen explains that she “would have liked people to have had quite a discerning relationship with the photographs, to have only liked a few of them and to have thought ‘God, there’s a lot of trash out there’... that didn’t really happen.”

Although open exhibitions have been criticised for contributing to a potential crisis in quality as a result of not having any quality control, it would seem more likely that this method of display will encourage viewers to be more discerning artistically, informed by their personal tastes.

In ‘Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art’, Mary Anne Stanisewski explains that the value and meaning of an artwork is always created within its institutions, whether they be galleries, publications, histories, museums, and so on.4 Altering the spatial-ideological context of a gallery, in this case using a collectivist approach, necessarily creates different values and different meaning.

If art, in the white-walled environment, is an aesthetic object or experience removed from its everyday context, then we can conceive of the cluttered and collective approach not as an excision from an earlier context – but instead as a series of reconfigurations. Art works mutter between, over and above one another, silence and exploit one another, while themes and meanings appear and dissolve.

Is it unlikely, despite the Zarathustrian pronouncements, that there is a serious crisis in the field of curatorship; it is even less likely the role is moribund. Instead, new modes of practise are developing alongside a recycling of historical approaches. While collective and self-regulatory groups such as Colab are suspected of hastening the erasure of the curator, this is more realistically a transference of responsibility. Of course, curators have never been autonomous. Gallery directors, boards of trustees, art dealers, and funding bodies all wield tenacious influence over curatorial decision. Minimising the role of the curator is not the only way to address an imbalance of power in exhibition ideology – but it’s a move in the right direction.

If the austere aesthetic of the modern art exhibition is spatially analogous to authoritative individualism, the open exhibition can be understood as analogous to collectivism and collaboration. Ironically, then, the crowded and cluttered gallery provides more space for invention and indicates new avenues for curatorial dialogue.

1. Mark Spiegler “Do Critics Still Matter?” The Art Newspaper April 2005.

2. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 16.

3. Ibid., 16-7.

4.Mary Anne Stanisewski, Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1995), 28.

Open Salon 2009 Interview with the previous Viewfinder curator, Nina Othen by current Viewfinder curator, Louise Forrester

How did your role change putting together the Open Salon 2006 exhibition?

It was really good fun in the sense that I was dealing with a lot more people – 150 photographers rather than one. The responsibility on my shoulders for that exhibition was kind of diluted amongst all those people – it felt less intense.

There being so much on show, so much diversity, that made my role as curator a little easier too. When putting exhibitions together, the culpability has to lie somewhere – sometimes with the artist, or the gallery, sometimes both – this was a nice change of dynamic from that.

It was quite stressful in terms of anticipation and not knowing what people’s responses would be. In terms of submissions, in the initial stages I had too little and then at one stage I thought I had way too many for the walls. A show like that won’t work if you’ve only got a few pictures. It was nice to communicate with so many people, it was very friendly and informal, which I always like.

So many networks have formed, between photographers and the gallery, between their friends. It’s been a real success and hopefully built up a bit more of a community spirit, we’ve had lots of local people interested in putting work in since, seeing this gallery as a local resource.

How do you think the photographers found it having to choose their own work?

That was really interesting – some people just picked up an old photograph from their bedside table and stuck that in, other people really deliberated over which to put in.

There were so many approaches: some people took it very, very seriously, others not seriously at all. Initially, what I was looking for was the real oddities: the cardboard frame, the passport photo, something out of the album just blue tacked to the wall. In fact a lot of people took great pride in

the presentation of their photograph.

Right from the beginning, I tried to keep from helping people with the selection process – if I’d helped one person, I should have helped everyone really. I was quite strict about that, but still some people did bring me options. I wanted to invite people to be a bit more proactive in their selection process.

Do you think the audience differed at all from other exhibitions?

There were lots more visitors, more passing trade as it were, just passing down the street and popping in – and staying a lot longer as well. The exhibition gathered a bit of a buzz about it. We probably had more families visit, a wider age range. Often with contemporary art spaces/ photography spaces, interest comes mainly from the young, trendy art student bracket.

One problem was that the Open Salon became more of an attraction than an exhibition, in some way, and in a way the ideas of the exhibition got lost. The exhibition had the potential to become quite a critical assessment of different approaches. What I would have liked would be for people to have had quite a discerning relationship with the photographs, to have only liked a few of them and to have thought ‘God, there’s a lot of trash out there, people taking pictures out there that really shouldn’t be taking pictures’. That didn’t really happen. The photographs all worked together, I think the ‘bad’ ones were seriously helped by the exhibition.

There were quite a few that I really disliked but I took great pleasure in displaying them because that was part of putting on this show.

Were there any photographs that you considered not hanging?

Yes, but the rules behind the show had been written so I put up the ones I disliked the most with quite a good feeling,

that was the nature of putting on an exhibition like the Open Salon.

What would you have done if you had a photograph which you felt compromised the gallery?

We reserved the right not to display any image if we felt it was really explicit, or wrong, but it’d have to be incredible offensive. Personally, I’d be most worried about a photograph that contained some sort of religious criticism, because it’s so hot in the media at the moment – I wouldn’t have wanted the media to focus on one image from the exhibition. There was one slightly controversial photograph of a girl in the sea wearing just a pair of pants. She was lying down in a slightly womanly way, although naively, with the waves crashing over her – you could say that photograph had slightly untoward connotations to it, but at the same time it hasn’t crossed over a line at all because it was actually such an innocent situation.

picture the moment Introduction by Louise Forrester Photographers: Ludovic des Cognets Claire Davidson Anna Hillman James Reid

Picture the Moment explores improvisation and collaboration between dancers, choreographers and photographers. Picture the Moment has proved an exciting, and challenging, exhibition to curate, not least because it has been so hard to picture quite how it might come together. Rather than reaching a particular moment of clarity there has been a continued stream of new ideas and developments, all of which are still in motion.

The exhibition has evolved and mutated according to each participant’s particular interests, guided only by the overarching themes of photographed performance.

The improvised, fluid nature of this seems appropriate, and as curator it is interesting to experience the same uncertainty toward the exhibition’s development as the photographers and performers must feel when embarking on a collaborative, improvised performance.

Even at this late stage of producing the catalogue, at which exhibition content would ordinarily be defined, Picture the Moment remains organic – images included in the exhibition may not have yet been produced.

Photographs in this multi-venue exhibition will be shown not only in the Viewfinder but also at Laban and at Trinity College of Music, in the Old Royal Naval College, as part of the improvised dance festival In the Moment.

piCture the moment Collaborations between performers and photographers Ludovic des Cognets, Claire Davidson, Anna Hillman and James Reid

Exhibition open: 7 – 22 Feb 2009 Mon to Fri 9 – 5pm, Sat & Sun 12 – 4pm Live performance in the gallery: 20 Feb 2009, 7 – 8pm Lizzie Sells and London Concrete improvise a site-specific performance, photographed by Claire Davidson.

Photography workshop: 22 February, 1 – 4pm Join us for a fun photography workshop – after discussing which themes and ideas in Picture the Moment interest you most, set off for an hour taking photographs inspired by these themes. We’ll reconvene at the gallery to show each other the photographs taken (a very friendly affair!), and publish a selection on www.viewfinder.org.uk – see http://www. viewfinder.org.uk/workshop5.html for sample photographs taken on the most recent workshop.

The workshop costs £5; members are entitled to one free workshop each.

Places are limited to ten participants – reserve your spot now!

Exhibition continues at: Laban and Trinity College gallery@viewfinder.org.uk • Tel 020 8858 8351, ext. 2 • www.viewfinder.org.uk Viewfinder Photography Gallery Linear House, Peyton Place, Greenwich SE10

dreams Essay by Dominic Paterson Photographers: Shaun Caton Nicolas Gonzalez

Some time ago a crazy dream came to me I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three.

I went to the doctor the very next day To see what kinda words he could say.

He said it was a bad dream.

I wouldn’t worry ‘bout it none, though, They were my own dreams and they’re only in my head.

Bob Dylan, “Talkin’ World War II Blues” Bob Dylan’s infamous shift in the mid-60s from ‘proper’ folk music to electric ‘folk-rock’ was presaged by a number of songs in which ambiguous dream imagery replaced the certainties of the protest music with which he made his name. Listen to the recording of his concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1964 and the disparity in tone is marked; the singer sounds most engaged (and his audience least so) when unveiling songs in which image follows image, rather than those which tell a story from beginning to end. In these songs, Dylan seemingly threw out political songwriting, as a form of storytelling addressed to an imagined community of like-minded souls, to gamble instead with the possibility that there might be listeners who could let the images play without trying to turn them too quickly into stories. Indeed, one of the new songs played at the Philharmonic Hall – “Gates of Eden” – makes this point explicitly. After a montage of mystical imagery, Dylan finishes with this verse: “At dawn my lover comes to me/ And tells me of her dreams/ With no attempts to shovel the glimpse/ Into the ditch of what each one means...” Don’t be too hasty to make meaning, he reproaches, knowing that’s likely just what we have been doing.

Dylan’s lyrics touch on a fundamental problem with dreams: they are trying to communicate something, or so it seems, but in trying to make them communicable

we can easily lose their essence. We have to translate dreams to share them, but as dreams they are our own, and in our heads. “A dreamer is by definition alone, solitary, separated from social activity,” Peter Brown argues.1 But Brown’s study of the dream as a trope in Middle English literature also makes the point that the representation of dreams was deeply connected to the social, precisely as a “meeting-place” of private experience and public expression.

“Dreams, by their nature, are able to express a sense of fragmentation, a loss of continuity between the self and the outer world, since they operate through striking juxtaposition, distortion, displacement, condensation and appearance. A dream is therefore well suited to the representation and analysis of alienation, of a sense of lost authority, or of a searching for connections that have become hidden, tenuous, or problematic.”2 Photographs made after or from dreams share in this problem of translation, even if they have an advantage over literature in being visual and thus closer, perhaps, to dream experience. The work of Nicolas Gonzalez poses this question of how we might make connections between images that are not obviously sequential, and which feel like fleeting glimpses into another kind of experience.

Similarly, in the Polaroids constructed by Shaun Caton and his patients we are faced with images which are in some sense necessarily opaque to us, and which address the issue of where selves meet the world and where they lose contact with it. Both projects, in turning dreams into images with some kind of public address, invite us to ask what kind of analysis is able to read them, to interpret them – by what authority and in what terms? In trying to make sense of them might we simply miss the point? If human beings have always seen significance in dreams, the kinds of messages they have been thought to convey

and the authority by which they might be interpreted have been subject to profound historical shifts.

Doctors, as well as writers and artists, have for centuries made it their business to attend to dreams and sort the good from the bad, and the significant from the banal. The 5th-century scholar Macrobius divided dreams into five categories, with confused impressions and those resulting from physical causes or anxiety deemed insignificant, whilst three other types – enigmatic, prophetic and oracular – were seen as different modes of premonition.3 The somnium or enigmatic dream, in particular, as “one that conceals with strange shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the information being offered” necessitated interpretation, a decoding of symbols.4 Interestingly, dreams were not considered particularly important by Montaigne, whose essays generally take every opportunity for self-analysis and rendering the private public. By the 17th century dreams were seen as indicative of the balance of humours and were therefore useful diagnostically, and read through the lens of existing medical knowledge.5 In a move which has greatly affected our own relationship to dreaming, Freud famously placed dream analysis at the very origin of psychoanalysis. Dreams were for him indications – along with slips of the tongue, jokes, and symptoms – that some kind of knowledge that is in us (that is us, in a sense) is persistently trying to escape our censorship and see the light of day.

Psychoanalysis is founded in part on the discovery that dreams are messages to ourselves which we are structurally unable to understand, but which the right kind of listening might be able to interpret. In publishing ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1899 Freud publicised his own dreams – and arguably, by narrating them so clearly, sanitised them, making them fit for the purpose of demonstrating the

interpretive authority of psychoanalysis.6 Nonetheless, Freud significantly shifted the terms by which the enigma of the dream could be understood.

A rational explanation of even the most outlandish imagery is possible in Freud’s view, once we accept that dreams are ways of smuggling unacceptable thoughts past our self-censorship, and that this happens via the dream-work, the mechanism of displacement and condensation which is the creative artist, as it were, of our dreams. Significantly, Freud’s first proper foray into the psychoanalysis of art was in a long essay entitled ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907), in which he presented the artist or writer as a kind of analogue of the analyst, participating in a therapeutic working-through of dreams, a finding of the truth encoded at their heart. In this essay, Freud took both Jensen and the heroine of his novella as figures for the way psychoanalysis reconstructs the meaning of a dream or fantasy by finding the wish it fulfils and leading the patient to a recognition of this which reawakens them.

One of the pleasures of reading the text is the way Freud recapitulates Jensen’s narrative and makes it into a kind of detective story in which things that are at first puzzling – statues coming to life, visions of Pompeii appearing – are revealed to be merely delusions based in the hero’s repression of his sexual desire.7 But again, this shift from the enigmatic to the rational isn’t quite adequate as a way of conveying dream experience, compelling though it may be as a narrative about analytic method. Artists have certainly tended to aim less at the resolution of dreams into explanations than they have at sustaining the ambiguity of the dream as enigma.

In a brilliant account of the problematic of expertise in relation to dreams, Adam Phillips (himself a practicing psychoanalyst) draws attention to the way in which

dreams are already placed in cultural, familial, and personal contexts which overdetermine what we think dreams are good for, and the kind of sense we look for in them. As already indicated, this wish for sense can itself be a problem. Phillips argues that in psychoanalysis “at least to some extent, the dream fits, even fits in.

But there is no reason to believe that everything in a life – each thought, feeling, action, dream – can be linked, or must fit in. It is the making coherent of a life – the forcing of a pattern – that people often suffer from (symptoms are a way of willing coherence.)”8 It might be in this regard that artistic responses to dreams come into their own, as effects of disjunction, fragmentation, incoherence etc. can be more easily tolerated – even enjoyed – in the realm of aesthetics than in other areas of life. Finding words for art works can be as hard as finding words for dreams, though in both cases this doesn’t stop us from trying. The reasons might be different in each case, however. Whilst art works can be hard to describe because they manifest the subjective vision of others, dreams manifest – at least on the Freudian model – an otherness in ourselves. To quote Phillips again: “To say that we dream is to say that we do not know what is going on inside us, we don’t understand the language that is going on.

But, by the same token, we go on comparing it, finding likenesses – likenesses that are not the dream, but what we might call aspects of it. Interpretations are more or less persuasive aspects, ways of keeping the story going, ways of moving the dream on. The interpreter is never sufficiently competent: the dream is never exhausted.”9 Good art works are similarly resistant to interpretive exhaustion, and the process of finding likenesses Phillips evokes seems particularly pertinent to the works included in this exhibition. These images

invite comparisons between dreams and art works, particularly photographic art works, but also call up a series of personal similes, of things they remind us of, associations determined by our own cultural, familial and personal idiosyncrasies. Though they represent the dreams of others, and in that sense be beyond our grasp, they might certainly strike the viewer as generally ‘dream-like.’ This phrase ‘dream-like’ is often used, but on closer examination it is hard to be sure what it really means: what, when it comes down to it, are dreams actually like? And are photographs in any sense like dreams?

The fixity and the realism of most photographs would seem to undercut such a claim. However, for the Surrealists – cited

by Gonzalez as an inspiration – documentary photographs as well as those estranged by distortion, montage, doubling or close-up effects, could engage the same unconscious terrain as the dream. As Rosalind Krauss argued in her seminal essay ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’ the radical implication of this practice was that reality itself – as the supposed indexical referent of photography – appeared already constituted as representation by subjective desire.10 In other words, the distinction between reality and fantasy or dreams was challenged in Surrealist photography. Recent theoretical readings of Freud have reinforced this challenge to conventional thinking.

In the cinema the device of the ‘dream sequence’ is often used. Indeed, it is over-used to the point where has become a satirical shorthand too: the camera zooms in on the subject, the picture begins to dissolve (stereotypically in waving lines), or to fade out and we are in dream space. Of course, the point of the convention whereby we are shown that we are entering dream space is that there is usually no other visual cue to differentiate it from the rest of the film.

Though some critics have been sceptical of the extent to which dreams and movies are really comparable (not least because in the cinema we are outside the action looking in, whereas we are at the centre of our dreams) we might at least say that all cinematic space is dreamlike – in the sense that it is a space of the imaginary.11 Films are dream sequences, and photographs can share in this relation. The Slovenian psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Zisek recently suggested that Freud’s dream theory, which is nowadays often seen as evidence of his obsolescence, is actually particularly relevant to our times.

In a theoretical move which has been crucial to several of his recent books, Zisek argues that we cannot simply oppose fantasy to reality, that in fact the former is the support of the latter, what gives it its intelligibility. The political lesson of this for Zisek is that “the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.”12 It is not that we need to escape from dreams back to reality, but that we should have the courage to pursue our dreams to the end. The call to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ is already an ideological move, and one that Zisek suggests we resist: “reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.”13 The therapeutic and aesthetic power of dreams is asserted in the work included here, but the paradoxes of representing and interpreting dream experience are also acknowledged. As viewers of these works we are given the chance to sustain our own dreams and to engage in those of others, wary perhaps of being experts on them.

To return to this essay’s entry-point into dreams, Bob Dylan’s ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ perhaps we need to share our dreams, however difficult that might be, precisely to avoid

over-valuing the solitude they provide, and to include others in the most private of experiences.

Well, now time passed and now it seems Everybody’s having them dreams.

Everybody sees themselves walkin’ around with no one else.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time, But all of the people can’t be right all of the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

‘I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.’

I said that.

1. Peter Brown, ‘On the Borders of Middle English Dream Visions,’ in Brown (ed.), Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 28.

2. Ibid, 44.

3 .Tony Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 194.

4. Macrobius, cited in Charles Dahlberg, ‘Macrobius and the Unity of the “Roman de la Rose”,’ Studies in Philology, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 1961), p. 575.

5. Peter Holland, ‘ ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in the Renaissance’ in Brown, op cit.

6. This is the contention of Alexander Welsh in his Freud’s Wishful Dream Book, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

7. On the affinity between detective work and Freudain analysis see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm,’ Theory and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3, (May 1979), pp. 273-288.

8. Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts, (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 71.

9. Ibid, p. 74.

10. Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,’ October, Vol. 19, (Winter, 1981), pp. 3-34.

11. Such a sceptical account is given by Robert Curry in his essay ‘Films and Dreams,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 83-89.

12. Slavoj Zisek, ‘Freud Lives!’ London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 10 (May 25th 2006), p. 32.

13. Ibid.

Painterly photographs Essay by Dominic Paterson Photographers: Ben Ali Ong Benedicte Emsens Caroline Fraser Steven Spencer

‘Photography is very beautiful, but one cannot admit it’[Ingres]. When painting re-covers the photograph, occupying it insidiously or triumphantly, it does not admit that the photograph is beautiful. It does better: it produces the beautiful hermaphrodite of instantaneous photograph and painted canvas, the androgyne image.

Michel Foucault, ‘Photogenic Painting’ Writing for Photo News in October 1860, the critic A.H. Wall made the following appraisal of an allegorical photograph by Oscar Rejlander entitled Infant Photography or Photography Receiving a Fee from the Painter: “Photography – the infant art – is represented by a dimpled little cupid, gracefully posed beside a camera, upon the lens of which is placed one of his plump little hands, while the other stretches forth a new brush about to be received by a hand bearing a pallete, the fellow of which proffers the golden fee. Come, brothers of the brush, dismiss a silly pride and jealousy, foolishly cherished by you and your false friends, take this new brush in the spirit of gratitude and wisdom, as a means towards loftier ends than you have yet attained in art, for truth can have no better mate than the beautiful, nor the beautiful than the true; and their union can never be unharmonious.”1 Rejlander himself had propagandised for photography as an aid to painting, but had also made a significant number of works in which he employed painterly styles, poses and compositional techniques – including very specific restagings of figures from Titian, Raphael and Donatello, amongst others – to elevate photography to the status of art.

If Rejlander’s claim that photography can be seen as both means to enhance painting and as art in its own right is by now uncontroversial, Wall’s vision of a perfectly harmonious unity of painting as beauty and photography as truth is one which the shared history of the two mediums hardly bears out. The attraction of a modernist approach to photography in

the early twentieth century was partly determined by the ongoing devaluing of its aesthetic status vis-à-vis painting. Even as late as in 1934 Beaumont Newhall could note that “there is hardly an artist practicing today who does not consider the photograph a mechanical debasement of his art – anti-art – void of all creativeness.”2 Unsurprisingly therefore, photographers often took pains to validate their work in distinction from, rather than in conformity with, paradigms established in painting. The Australian photographer Max Dupain exemplifies this in his blunt statement of 1947: “The photograph is concerned with showing actual life often beyond the scope of the human eye, the painting is a symbol of life and fused with the spiritual interpretation of the painter. The former is objective, the latter subjective and never the twain shall meet. The more akin a photograph is to a painting or manual work of art, the more it diverges from its main and most potent quality, and vice versa. It is necessary to develop photography with particular reference to its mechanistic form. Let it be automatic as much as possible, the human element being selection of viewpoint and moment of exposure, subsequent technicalities being performed skilfully and scientifically.”3 The work included in this exhibition operates in a far less doctrinaire manner, and in it all kinds of image-making can be explored aesthetically, without such concern for autonomy. The varied practices of Benedicte Emsens, Caroline Fraser, Benjamin Ong, and Steven Spencer suggest other possibilities for negotiating the binaries of objective/subjective and painting/photography.

As the above epigraph from Foucault suggests, there is more to the merging of these mediums than the validation of an ‘infant art’ according to canons of beauty developed by its precursor. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many artists working with photography have looked again at the consequences of the photographic

for all manner of aesthetic and artistic conventions, and developed practices which question canons of beauty and truth. For instance, in 1986 the American artist Louise Lawler made a photo-based work entitled Equipment and Entrenchment. The piece consisted of two photographs, one showing a filing system for slides, the other an empty lecture theatre with two white projection screens. The juxtaposition of these two images, along with Lawler’s mordant title, implied a critical take on the status of photography within the academic institution, as well as on its relationship(s) with painting.

Equipment and Entrenchment proposes that it is the photographic archive of paintings, sculptures, and other art works which provides art history with the tools of its trade, tools which are then put to work in a pedagogy which disseminates and entrenches systems of aesthetic value. These aesthetic values are significant not least insofar as they serve to naturalise historically specific cultural values and related modalities of power and social reproduction.

Clearly informed by a materialist critique of culture, Lawler’s photographic practice has turned again and again to the ways in which artworks – so often in art history presented as unframed images – are, in fact, framed and made intelligible by the multiple sites in which they are sold, stored, curated, published, exhibited, collected and housed. Her 1984 piece ‘Monogram’, for instance, showed a white Flag painting by Jasper Johns hanging above the monogrammed white bed-linen of its owner; Pollock and Tureen, of the same year, revealed a drip-painting to be functioning as a backdrop to a piece of decorative ceramic.

As an art historian who often includes work by Pollock and Johns in lectures, these photographs always bring me up short: I know very well that art works are commodities and not only images, but nonetheless seeing the raw evidence of this in images of collector’s homes comes as a shock.

The slide lecture, along with the illustrated survey book, is a signal manifestation of what French writer

Andre Malraux termed the ‘museum without walls.’4 For Malraux, photography made stylistic analysis and art historical taxonomy possible in a hitherto unimaginable way; it democratised images, offering them up to be ordered and re-ordered. Lawler’s ‘Equipment and Entrenchment’ references this in the dual screens of the lecture theatre – a mode of teaching which emphasises reading formal differences between works. In this sense the history of art is profoundly contingent on photographic reproduction; photographs let us read paintings across historical and geographic distance, and thereby make certain kinds of sense of them.

‘Equipment and Entrenchment’s own evocation of the critical potential of this reading across images, in its juxtaposition of slide archive and slide lecture, points to another way of conceptualising the historical relationship between photography and painting. Most famously expressed by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ this approach sees the photograph utopically replacing painting, banishing its ‘aura’ of uniqueness and distance in favour of reproduction and presentness-at-hand. 5 In the right historical circumstances, Benjamin contends, photography is a revolutionary form, superceding bourgeois painting, and making cultural objects available in a form other than that of the fetishised, unique, commodity-as-relic.

Instantiating Benjamin’s hope for photography as a tool for reading culture critically, Lawler’s work shows, at the level of content, how photography can serve the hegemony of painting, while the form of her work implies that it can also call it into question.

From the perspective of the 21st century – a perspective formed in the omnipresence of digital media – the tensions which freighted the exchange between painting and photography in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the debates which attended it, may seem rather quaint, but they were real enough

in their time. The exchange between these mediums has been marked by two-way processes of anxiety and accommodation; photography superceding painting as a representational medium, but painting providing the terms by which photography can be validated as art (and, importantly, by which photographers can be recognised as artists). The two were intimately connected from the start – Daguerre was, after all, a diorama painter, whose interest in photographic processes was formed in relation to this.6 From the 1840s, painting could form a supplement to photography – furnishing it with subject matter, compositional approaches, and aesthetic styles, just as photography could supplement painting.

Rejlander, as we have already seen, made photographs directly copying the dress and poses of figures in Renaissance art. Eugene Delacroix, Walter Sickert, Francis Bacon, and Larry Rivers are just four examples of artists whose work often used photographic sources to painterly effect. In the 1960s the silkscreens of Warhol and Rauschenberg brought photographic reproduction even more conspicuously into the realm of painting. More recently, Jeff Wall has made large-format photographic transparencies that function as continuations of the ambitions of the ‘painting of modern life’, often making this explicit in references to Delacroix, Manet, and other nineteenth-century painters. Gerhard Richter, taking the opposite track, has used painting to make photographs.

Speaking in 1973 he explained how this approach came about: “the photograph, which plays such an enormous part in everyday life, took me by surprise. Suddenly I could see it quite differently: as an image which, deprived of all the conventional criteria which I had til then associated with art, provided me with a new way of seeing. It had no style, no composition, it was not judgemental, it liberated me from my personal experience. It had, in fact, nothing: it was pure image. That is why I wanted to possess it, to show it, not use it as a vehicle for painting, but use painting as a

vehicle for photography.”7 These hybrid practices are only some examples of the combinations of the painterly and the photographic which have abounded since the early years of photography. The mixing of photography with painting has been a notable feature of its development, one register of the fact that photography doesn’t possess a singular history, or, to put it another way, that it doesn’t follow a modernist trajectory towards purity and self-definition.

To return at the present time to the pairing of photography and painting is, then, not so much to juxtapose two separate histories, but to acknowledge their co-dependence and to mine that for the artistic interest it can still provide at the moment when digital technology makes images ever more porous across mediums. The aesthetic effect pertaining to painting/ photography is, if it can be described in general terms, one dependent on the juxtaposition of sets of oppositions: objective/subjective, auratic/non-auratic, original/reproduced, made/taken and so on. As painting and photography are often defined in opposition (just as by Dupain, above) such juxtaposition can have the effect of undoing or deconstructing the fixity of each opposed term. The singular objecthood of painting is sutured to the reproducibility of the photograph, the objectivity of the camera lens to the subjectivity and contingency of the traces of the hand. Emsens, Fraser, Ong, and Spencer all work along the lines of what Foucault termed the ‘androgyne image.’ By allowing that photographs need not adhere to narrow definitions of beauty or truth they open up other ways of seeing.

Photography is not fetishised by these artists, but rather treated as one means among others of making images – a means which can be reworked, added to, subtracted from, rendered opaque and so on.

If Louise Lawler’s work points out how photography is often complicit in masking the commodity status of art objects by delivering them up as pure image, the work in this exhibition directs our attention to the objecthood and materiality of

the photograph, and of the photographic process itself.

By hybridising rather than purifying photography, they rediscover its complex history and the range of its aesthetic affects. These practices are indicative of the variety of ways in which photography today is itself ever more androgyne and hard to define. As Geoffrey Batchen insightfully puts it: “it used to be said that photography was tormented by the ghost of painting. Used to be said. For now photography is the one that is doing the haunting. Where once art photography was measured according to the conventions and aesthetic values of the painted image, today the situation is decidedly more complicated. Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.”8

1. A.H. Wall, ‘An Hour with Rejlander,’ Photo News 4 (1860), cited in Stephanie Spencer, O.G. Rejlander: Photography as Art, (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1985), p. 104.

2. Newhall, ‘Photography and the Artist,’ Parnassus 6 (Oct. 1934), cited in Carol Troyen, ‘Photography, Painting, and Charles Sheeler’s “View of New York”’ The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), p. 739.

3. Dupain, cited in Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, (London: MIT, 2001), p. 99.

4. On Malraux and his 1952 text The Musée Imaginaire, see Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, (London: MIT, 1997), pp.54-60.

5. Benjamin, W. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, (London: Pimlico, 1999).

6. Peter Galassi, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, argued apropos his 1981 exhibition ‘Before Photography’ that “photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition.”

MoMA, No. 18 (Spring, 1981), p. 1 7. Cited in Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Readymade, Photography and Painting in the Painting of Gerhard Richter,’ in Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry, (London: MIT, 2001), p. 380.

8. Batchen, op. cit., p. 109.

One At A Time Introduction by the guest curator: Paula Silcox Photographer: Ellen Nolan

One At A Time poignantly observes the dynamics and emotional hierarchy within single parent families.

Here, the artist Ellen Nolan continues her examination of the contemporary state of the family cell in Britain by focusing her attention on the complex issues of single parenthood.

The images explore an expressive undercurrent that reveals both the inherent tensions and intimacies that arise from this complex relationship.

The majority of the subjects are photographed within a domestic environment and through this engagement in their personal spaces Nolan captures the personal and unique moments of internalised anxieties and expressed intimacies. However relaxed the subjects appear to be in front of the camera, small nuances in the gaze of the subject, their bodily postures or details in the background environment explore and suggest the nature of this relationship.

School Run Essay by Eloise Donnelly Photographers: Kelly Hill Jonathan Illingworth

A photograph is not merely a substitute for a glance, it is a sharpened vision. It is the revelation of new and important facts.’

Sid Grossman The daily walk to school is a ritual which is familiar the world over, a rite of passage that is undertaken almost subconsciously at different times of life: by schoolchildren for whom it constitutes an essential part of the daily routine, and by parents for whom their own experiences as schoolchildren are brought into sharper consideration. It is thus a cyclical event, highlighting the issues of interconnectedness and resonance which are explored in this collection of photographs by Kelly Hill and Jonathan Illingworth. By taking as their subject a journey undertaken ritually on a daily basis, we are forced to re-examine things that are so familiar we take them for granted, revealing a rich tonality in the mundane and quotidian.

When we examine everyday surroundings in photographs, we begin to see our observations as part of a potential series. Our attention is drawn to the relationships between details, the links and resonances that become apparent only when we stop to consider.

Hill, despite setting herself a challenge of taking one picture per day, often returns home with several potential images to upload. Her choice is dependent on the subject matter that fits in with the current sequence she is building. In her photographs we see recurrent themes, concerns and textures, during different weeks and terms of the school calendar, that emphasise the interconnectedness of her environment. In January, Hill had recorded an egg smashed upon the pavement.

During the month of March, she photographed chicken eggs nestled within an incubator, and later, the eggs are shown to have hatched. Three details from the daily

routine have illustrated the beginning of a new life cycle, giving us a heightened awareness of the natural forces developing around us.

Likewise, Illingworth’s photographs display a concern with recurrent subjects within a woodland setting. Three images capture paintwork in various stages of corrosion at different distances: a red and white striped pattern intact on a metal board; pale green paint peeling away from a rusty metal girder; and then a close-up of vibrant orange rust, confining the paintwork to the edge of the frame. Seen together, these images can be read as a series confirming the inexorable nature of decay, thereby throwing the connections between different daily observations into sharper relief.

Taking photographs of the same geographical location over a period of time creates a pictorial record of this sense of change and development: how the landscape is altered and remade, and how various forces, including those of the photographers, impact on the environment.

A key part of this theme is explored by recording the natural cycle of seasonal change. As we undertake a routine journey, we are normally aware of sudden changes in our surroundings – an overnight snowfall, for example – yet the gradual changes in the earth’s cycle are often consigned to our peripheral view. The first signs of the crocuses emerging from the hard winter soil; an image of pink fluffy blossom on a clear blue sky; the gradual change in light from the bleakness of a January morning to the warmth of a spring day. It is through photographing the everyday that our attention is focused on these details, and the physical route of the journey ceases to be a passive location in which a ritual is carried out, but a vital participant in the process.

The sense of the change and development of the surroundings is at odds with the consistency of the daily walk. As Geertz has written, rituals and routines enable

society to maintain cohesion in moments of uncertainty and questioning. They provide constancy in the midst of change – a particularly important quality during childhood. Illingworth emphasises the ritualistic nature of the School Run by incorporating objects into his images, for example taking a doll’s head to photograph on a pole, creating a ceremonial object. The ritual thereby becomes a place where ideologies are constructed, where dreams and imaginations can be played out and visually documented.

In comparison with a commute, or other daily routines the school run is a rite that spans generations. This series of photographs reflect that joint consideration, contemplating childlike concerns, thoughts and dreams as much as adult observations. Hill discusses her daughters’ imaginary friends en route, and devises methods of photographing this idea. We see photographs of children’s paintings, a child asleep with a doll, and a picture of a thank-you note from the tooth fairy. Taken in delicate, softly focussed shots, these pictures display an imaginative, dreamlike quality which is emphasised by the inclusion of a postcard of the Cottingley Fairies on two occasions as a method of combining the real world with the make-believe.

In this way the photographers incorporate children’s perspectives into the narratives. Photographs of an empty classroom at the beginning of the school day, or two bouquets of freshly sharpened coloured pencils illustrate a sense of potential and childlike anticipation and encourages the viewer to reflect on their own experiences as schoolchildren. Fears are also explored: a photograph of a swimming pool scene taken from behind a textured glass screen evokes feelings of exclusion and alienation, while an image of broken glass looking out into a dark wood creates a heightened sense of concern and threat.

For each detail recorded by the photographers, an infinite number of reactions and evocations are possible. What comes across most clearly is the presence of extraordinary beauty in the mundane and everyday. Plastic bags caught delicately in branches, the reflections of tree branches on glass, the fragility of wild flowers are recorded and our perceptions of them automatically change as a result of looking at the photograph. We gain insight into the relationship between the natural and the man made, something made particularly poignant within a city.

Ilingsworth’s route takes him through Plumstead Wood in South London. While highlighting the portentous, ominous connotations of woods and trees the images also make us aware of the gradual deterioration of the man made world within this natural setting. We are made aware of how fragile manufactured material is; we see the detritus of building work, peeling paintwork, rusty metalwork all in a state of decay whilst the natural world thrives around them. Often only traces of human activity remain. Even Illingworth’s photograph of a boot hidden in the woodland has been there so long it has become part of the natural environment.

Covered in moss, perhaps housing a complex ecosystem within, its original function has long been forgotten.

Likewise, what was once a painted metal screen is gradually disappearing beneath an abundance of wild flowers and creepers, the delicacy of the foliage subverting our perception of the hard-wearing nature of metal. In this way we are constantly encouraged to reassess our perceptions and reconsider our perspectives.

The depiction of the transient nature of the observations – a reflection in a puddle, a shaft of light, fog on a window – are details which serve to underline the essential nature of the medium of photography.

The picture itself is the result of the momentary, fleeting action of light on a material (be it paper or a digital

sensor) and thus itself emphasises the constant effect of time on our surroundings. As Susan Sontag has written ‘Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.’

Ephemeral forms, such as snow, light and condensation, are solidified and preserved through the medium of photography, and we can observe them in closer detail, questioning our tendency to edit out the intricacies of everyday life.

However, it is not only specific details which are highlighted in this exhibition, but rather universal concerns. Despite being personal journeys and rituals on the parts of the photographers, they are equally pertinent for the viewer as we join them on their journey, and enable ourselves to identify links with our own individual daily rituals.

A photograph of the front pages of the newspapers on Obama’s inauguration day serves to remind us of the wider world and forces us to readjust our perspectives, allowing us to contemplate questions on a private, micro level that are concurrently dominating the public sphere. The changing viewpoints and sources of light enable us to widen our appreciation of our own ‘school runs’, and realise how much of our surroundings go unnoticed.

The subjects in Hill and Illingworth’s photographs are the tiny details that so often are blurred within our peripheral vision, unregistered as we contemplate the events of the day. Yet by choosing to focus in on these details, they alter our viewpoint. Each item becomes particularly resonant, and we are forced to contemplate the details of our daily lives in new ways. It is therefore our own perception of our environments, of our own daily rituals, which is being examined here as opposed to the details which constitute it.