Today’s catch-up post is on a collaboration with family members in response to my late Nana’s photographic archive. This was one of the areas of work I wanted to address with Sarah, Caroline and Andy in the Re:view discussion sessions.
Firstly, a bit of background:
When my Nana passed away last summer at the age of 92, I was lucky to be one in my family to be given custodianship of her photographic archive, which spans over 100 years. As well as digitizing and sharing the archive with our large extended family (Nana had 8 children, thirty something grandchildren and I’ve lost count of the great grandchildren) I felt the archive offered a great opportunity to for a creative collaboration. I have collaborated on a number of occasions with my immediate family – with my mother on a photographic project for Fotomanias photography festival in 2011 ( and www.a-n.co.uk/p/1167514/) and my brothers on various projects through the years, including fanzines, exhibitions and events. Collaborating with my family has always been a way of connecting. I have a strong bond with my mother and brothers, but don’t get to see them as often as I want as I live in West Yorks, and they are in Glasgow. Doing creative projects with them is a way of maintaining and feeding that bond. Doing a collaboration with the wider family, and using the archive as a way of bringing us closer together (we are scattered across Scotland, England and Australia) felt like something Nana – to whom family was everything – would have liked. As my practice is increasingly about collaboration, conversations and relationships, it has felt right in many ways.
Prior to getting the Re:view bursary, I had been concerned with a number of ethical issues around the project. I wanted to be sure that I set the project up with my family in the most accessible, and democratic way as possible. I’m very conscious of issues of power, access and hierarchy as an artist working with others (and particularly non –artists) and the responsibilities that go with this- I feel this responsibility in working with my own family even more – we all lost an important person in our lives, and I want to be sensitive to that loss and grieving process that we will all be experiencing differently.
For the past few months, I’ve been scanning and sharing the archive with family through a private blog, which family members can contribute to, to share memories, information and stories. This process is slow as there are so many images to scan but the family are looking, sharing and posting which is really positive and lovely. Yesterday I got an email from my Uncle Gerry in Austraila to say he’d started looking at the blog. I’m hoping that all of our stories and memories can be brought together in a self-published book or pamphlet which could be given to each family member.
In my own practice. I have been working for a long time with family photographs; using them as a way of with exploring subjectivity, memory and identity within the family. Combining archival family images with found photographic materials as source material, cutting, collaging, editing, re- presenting and re-photographing – making new images , searching for meaning. These approaches have been informed by the work of photographers and writers Jo Spence, Annette Kuhn and others.
I wanted to look at how I could extend this individual practice to a communal one, with the family – to collectively investigate personal and family identity to explore what binds us together, and to create a new dynamic family archive.
What form could the project take? How could it remain open and flexible? What is my role? How do I ensure people feel a shared ownership?
These are the questions I wanted to address with Sarah, Caroline and Andy.
Continued tomorrow
