My FMP proposal seems to have been well received and plans for a huge road trip are being drawn up. As I weave together my approach before setting off and beginning the actual shooting work, I’m mindful of a number of comments and suggestions that have come in from a number of quarters – both […]
Read more
“The chimpanzee babies most prone to extended eye-to-eye contact with humans,” writes Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “were also the ones who had been separated from their mothers and were especially eager to reestablish any kind of contact.” Hrdy’s Mothers and Others, a study of the evolution of cooperative breeding, is turning into a gold mine for […]
Read more
My Final Major Project, Other Mothers, explores non-biological maternality, the mothering of a child who is not the mother’s own, whether through birth or adoption (1). It will hold a tension between issues of loss, abandonment and displacement on the one hand, and bonding, belonging and healing on the other. The project’s epicentre will be […]
Read more
It is done, at least for the time being. I’m really quite pleased with the eventual maquette for Other Mothers. I first tried a portrait A4 size for the project and it did not quite work. Instead I have gone for a cropped landscape which becomes more of a square shape in use because of […]
Read more
Other Mothers, more than my previous work, demands text as an accompaniment. Each relationship is a micro-story which an a photograph or a photographed projected image of a photograph cannot, by itself, tell. My tutor Cemre was the first to suggest strongly that was the project in which text would strongly support the overall effort. […]
Read more
“Museums and galleries are not neutral containers offering a transparent, unmediated experience of art,” writes Emma Barker in Contemporary Cultures of Display. She is, of course, quite right. Curators, critics and other opinion influencers, including collectors and artists themselves, not only play leading roles in deciding what is worthy of wall (or floor) space but […]
Read more
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, […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
“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 […]
Read more
“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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
Hey! So here’s my presentation considering where I’m at with my current photographic practice.
Read more