In the long gap since my last blog post, the snap election and aftermath have been a distraction… and life has been a bit all over the place generally, especially as every single weekend has been spent away. Lots of family stuff (an aunt’s funeral, a cousin’s birthday, a sister’s garden party) plus a short, much needed break in Wales… And also work, little of which has had any relation to my book dummy project, apart from the weekend spent photographing one big biker rally called Farmyard Party. But before I talk about that…
21st June I nipped over to University of Bolton for a one day symposium with the title “Publishing, Presenting and Exhibiting: Reaching 21st Century Audiences – A View from the North” which, given the aim of my professional development project, seemed timely. And it was really stimulating, even if it didn’t quite manage to do what it said on the tin. The speakers were three practitioners – in order of appearance, John Kippin, Mandy Barker, John Darwell – plus Thomas Dukes, curator at Open Eye Photographic Gallery in Liverpool. Though all four come from or are based in what is now broadly called The North, the question of what a northern perspective might be wasn’t addressed in any way. And what are 21st century audiences exactly? Are they really, essentially any different now to previously? Especially to photographers who are still producing, publishing and exhibiting work conventionally? Don’t know…
Gallery spaces seem to me to be increasingly suffering from identity crises. The cultural/social engineering agendas of funding bodies, and the accountability attached to spending of public and charitable funds, seems to engender anxieties in arts orgs and their staff about their own ‘usefulness’ which is then transferred to the spaces they run and the artists they engage to work with them. They seem to forget that artists make up part of their audience. And could it be that it’s the tabloid mentality (“Look what they’re spending YOUR money on!”) behind this kind of anxiety that’s the really useless thing in the context of culture? Is pleasure useless? I’ve yet to meet an artist whose primary concern is their usefulness – they may worry, amongst other things, about the relevance of their work perhaps, in relation to a whole range of factors, but usefulness? In a country where there’s still such a small number of dedicated photography galleries, do we really need the few we have to contort themselves into what could otherwise be more accurately described as community centres?
Whatever the platform or context may be – social media, publications online or in print, books, exhibitions, competitions etc – the takeaway from this symposium, in a nutshell, was… make good work. Then get it out there, by whatever means. And keep your fingers crossed.
Anyway, Farmyard Party. As anticipated, there were a lot of women in attendance. And I did photograph them, but… now that I have the time to edit the images at last, the ones that are jumping out at first glance are of men still. I just can’t seem to help myself…
One thing I remember noticing while I was shooting, was that the women I was trying to photograph were playing up to the camera the way a lot of men also tend to do at these rallies. It really irritated me to begin with. Then I realised that my annoyance might stem from the fact that they weren’t behaving in ways that would allow me to photograph them so they look as women ‘should’, and from that point on forced myself to photograph them whether I liked it or not. In the editing process I have still to get passed the same deeply ingrained block. It may take some time… But I’m working on it.
The plan for the coming month is to also go through all my digital images – which, bearing the above block in mind, should make the task even more interesting? In parallel I’ll pick back up the book design testing, and arrange my next consultation session. July looks like it’s going to be a fairly quiet month, thankfully, and with less distractions I hope to be able to take this project forward quite a bit.
