“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 […]
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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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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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