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My reflections at the end of last year have led me to looking at my work in a bigger context. For a long time I resisted any kind of interpretation of my work. Hey this blog was the cause/effect of doing just that.
My idea is to develop a body of work around people in cities – no surprise there – but recognising Europe is in a particular period of change. European cities were in the vanguard of the first waves of urbanisation. They are now the destination for another mass movement of people. So far so good. It's how they've historically grown and prospered. This time things are different. Attitudes and assumptions are being challenged. The essence of what it is to be a citizen is being fought for, intellectually and physically.
I’ll say up front my pictures aren’t documentary in terms of taking a journalistic approach. These are more personal which I appreciate can be a euphemism for self-referential shoe-gazing. As if.
My angle on this story is an appreciation in some way of what it is to be a child of Irish immigrants. Granted with the privilege of blending in but still with an appreciation of what it is to be an outsider.
There’s no set plan or timetable yet. I’ll share work in progress here. I’m also interested in other forms of presenting it. I’m not rejecting books by default but hey it’s 2017 and other ways and means are possible.
Wish me luck.
Wonderful to see Markéta Luskacová in conversation at the National Portrait Gallery this week with my friend Paul. She's an inspirational figure for me and her work in 70s London really does feel like another country where they do things differently. It was really apt to see her with Paul who played a big part in the development of my own ways of looking at the world.
London Street Musicians, Markéta Luskacová
I'm always fascinated by how people go about pursuing this passion in relation to the real world of making a living and looking after a family. Markéta's description of taking her son in his push-chair on her trips around Brick Lane was a wonderful illustration of the compromises made.
Her story is also a timely reminder of the role of immigrants in London's growth as a world city. Undoubtedly Markéta felt a cultural affinity with the musicians she photographed but their outsider status reflected her own experience.
Buy her books!
Not my typical topic but I must mention the artist Mat Collishaw’s current installation using virtual reality (VR) with the subject of the world’s first exhibition of photography held by William Henry Fox Talbot in Birmingham in 1839.
At first sight you see a white washed room empty apart from a set of tables and cabinets also painted white. Donning a VR headset transforms the space into a detailed recreation of the room at the time of the exhibition.
This is itself a compelling idea but I admire the attention to other facets of the experience both sensory and historical that enrich it. Mice scurry across the floor, smells and heat from a fire prickle your face. Moths get too close to the candle flames. You can hold a glass photographic plate. From outside the window the sounds of Chartists demonstrating against new technology taking away people’s jobs echo through space and time. Other 21st century visitors appear in your field of view as ghostly shapes.
Thresholds by Mat Collishaw from Mat Collishaw Studio on Vimeo.
My fascination is in the way Collishaw uses
- new technology to tell a story in way that enriches it without it becoming a product demonstration
- VR in particular as today’s magical way of representing reality
- the original uncertainty around what photography was and who was it for as a counterpoint to the current ubiquity of images
- photography as a harbinger of social disruption (last but not least)
As a practitioner of photography very much rooted in the 20the century it prompts me to revisit my thoughts on modernising street photography. Can these technologies add another dimension to my ways of working? Not only in creation but in production, display and distribution?
Interesting times!
Last year's cameraphone experiments were rewarding but, a little like following a particularly restrictive diet, left me hungry for more. A recent trip to Italy gave me the opportunity to indulge myself with a full menu of digital and film, colour and black & white. The first time I've worked with these combinations all together. The modern world, eh?
Well despite my fears of analysis paralysis it didn't really disrupt my natural ways of working. In the same way my fears of "thinking too hard" about my work by reviewing and editing my pictures for a book were unfounded, walking the streets of Venice with 3 different camera types felt more like enhancing my ways of expression. More seasoning if you will. Never miss a chance to overextend a metaphor...
Another first for this work was the resurrection of my social presence. I've tried Instagram but the way of collecting images together on Flickr was particularly useful for this piece of work. I appreciate I'm missing out on the sharing/following/interacting bit but that's for another time.
My inclusion in fLIP's on the streets edition gave me a kickstart to re-join my local group. I attended my last meeting in 2005 so it was a bit of a rip van winkle moment when I stumbled back in.
The timing of my (re)arrival became more propitious when we started talking about a new opportunity for the group to exhibit a sequence of images created by each photographer responding to the picture before to create a chain of apparently random but connected images. In one of those lovely moments of serendipity that street photography seems to cultivate I happened to have a copy of Ambiguous with me.
Nice to see the idea have another life.
Bit like me.
