Photojournalism of the most pressing and distressing events of our times is frequently rounded upon by photography’s best-known critical thinkers. We have Susan Sontag attacking photography in general: The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that, […]
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Perhaps I would say this as a history graduate, but I firmly believe historical study provides the best, if often imperfect, means of understanding the past. Based nearly always (I’m excepting micro-histories here) on multiple sources – primary, secondary and historiographical – historical studies move towards an ever more refined and relevant understanding of what […]
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“Put crudely,” say Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, “reframing is a kind of internal permission-giving to change, review, to let go and to move on. “It is not a way of discovering the ‘real’ to see if it is ‘biased’ but of finding new ways of perceiving the past so that we can change our […]
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“A connected series of small books,” suggests Arpita Shah, about my ongoing work. “Or perhaps one book, but with some form of separation of the elements.” This is most reassuring, as I’d always felt my project was personal, intimate and understated, and would be best presented at close and intimate range, and kept on a […]
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I’m having to consider the difference between printed matter and beamed light as I switch up my route towards the Other Mothers project. Proper consideration will also, I hope, enable me to get best use out of my small, turquoise-cased, projector. My starting point has been to look purely at the differences in the process […]
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This module is proving very challenging in terms of project work. All of the contextual material – from Jo Spence to Maria Kapajeva – is fascinating but none is gripping me as overly relevant to my own work. I find myself as admiring their output from afar, on its own terms, without that sense of […]
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I’m fascinated by the work of Caroline Furneaux, especially The Mothers I Might Have Had. Furneaux’s project stems from found images of her father’s previous (before her mother) girlfriends and is a whistle stop tour of fantasy and imaginings sprinkled with a healthy dash of voyeurism and play. Her gaze across the images is playful […]
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I love narrative, I love story-telling. But in my current project Other Mothers I am facing a fresh challenge: A newly formed archive of atomised images drawn from other archives (family albums) both from within my own family and from outside. Each ‘mother’ has a file, in which potentially suitable images for project work are […]
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Photographs, says Annette Kuhn in Family Secrets, are “evidence”. “Not that they are to be taken only at face value,” says Kuhn, “nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. “Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation – evidence in […]
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Much has been said during the week about a photograph’s relationship to reality, and what it ‘says’ about the world, whether and how what is said might be ‘trusted’ or ‘authentic’ and how a photograph’s iconicism or indexicality might shift over time. My own current work is largely autobiographical and involves feelings and happenings that […]
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I’m at the third layer of my autobiographical photographic trifle-making with respect to maternal abandonment. One module was consumed with trying to approach the loss of a mother through the eyes of a young child, using metaphor, light and fragments of my father’s writing. The second, with Becomings, sought to explore a fractured sense of […]
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I’ve begun an excavation of sorts. The ground to be dug is a growing mound of images from family albums, including my own. The work is part of a project with the working title ‘Other Mothers’ in which I’m attempting to…(honour? Declare love?) I’m not quite sure yet, but something, towards those incredible women from my […]
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Towards the end of the previous Sustainable Prospects module I had the growing impulse that the next stage of evolving my project lay in my ‘other mothers’. I want to explore my relationships with those incredible women in my life who, following my abandonment by own biological mother, have loved me, nurtured me and deeply […]
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Hey! So here’s my presentation considering where I’m at with my current photographic practice.
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I’ve begun to find the ongoing discussion about the impact of digital capture in photography really tedious. Fred Ritchen, in After Photography (Into the Digital), warns of “digital” photography as a “Trojan horse” that will both “end and enlarge” photography as “we have known it”. He compares “analogue” and “digital” photography to vinyl records and […]
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This week I realised (finally) I had become something of an old dog. An old dog that is a little loathe to learn new tricks. This week, we were focusing on digital marketing channels, particularly, it seems Instagram. Of all of the social media channels, Instagram is the one that gives me the biggest headache. […]
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The task: To pitch a creative proposal for Oxfam’s 2021 Secondhand September campaign. The result: Catwalk at Your Doorstep, which was a hybridised group effort which took elements from a number of different early ideas from our group members. At its most basic, the idea was to create a campaign that was especially accessible for […]
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Nail, hammer, ping. Boys and their use of string to create physical routes back to roots. Or, as Carol Mavor expands in Reading Boyishly: “I have seen my own boys do it: looping string inside and around a bureau drawer, up and over a bunk bed, down and through the axle of a toy truck, […]
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The image above has knocked me for six, as has the whole of Elina Brotherus’s work Anonciation. The image, number 32 in the series, is the penultimate photograph of Anonciation. It is the frozen end point in her burning yearning to become a mother. It reduced me to tears. “I’m showing this series of photographs […]
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I bought some rather expensive baryta paper a week or so ago with the hope it would add a little wow factor to some prints I was making for a customer. It is beautiful paper to be sure, with a gorgeous texture and just the right amount of reflectivity to reveal stunning pigment contrasts and […]
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