Assignment 3 Research 2

This is just a brief update on my research to date. There are still leads to follow, decisions to be made and photos to be taken but that last point worries me least at the moment because I am hoping that my research will guide me in the right direction. In my last post on this topic, here, I reflected on to documents I had found so far, the others I had ordered, my intention to visit the colliery at Hopewell and to research some poetry about the forest.

I have still not managed to visit Hopewell and this will now need to wait until mid February as we are having to make a journey north to sort out care for my elderly mother in law.  In the meantime I have been back to the record office; the trouble I find with this is that, good as the online catalogue may be, you’re never quite sure what you are going to find.

The first document was an official looking report about a number of mines, presumably owned by the same company. It contained a description of the different properties, the geological makeup of the area, location of the pits, calculations on the quantity of coal available with estimated revenue and projected costs of the operation, which in 1845 was £8500. So lots of really interesting stuff but not much I could use for this project.

The second document consisted of a series of what looked like mortgage agreements for various ‘gales’ (mines), all written out in beautiful script on heavy parchment and stamped in the traditional way.  Again interesting but not relevant.

I had more success with the third lot, a huge box of sheets of black and white photographs. The title in the archive Photographs of Railways in the Forest of Dean and Gloucester Area but it was a search for photographs of a specific mine that generated this result so I thought it might be worth looking at.  Over a hundred sheets like the ones below, each with 3 or 4 photographs, mostly railway  related but not all by any means and ranging from the late 19th century up until the mid 1960s.

The first 3 sheets are from old coal mines and the bottom right from an iron mine. Whether I will be able to use any of them remains to be seen but it gives me a sense of what these areas used to look like.

My visit to Coleford library was more fruitful than the main library in Gloucester in terms of books on the Forest.  As well as Fay Godwin’s ‘The Secret Forest of Dean’ which had already borrowed from the University  of Glos. library, I found ‘The Forest of Dean’ by local historian, Humphrey Phelps. This book covers the whole area, ‘past and present’, or at least up to 1982, and a little book of myths and legends produced by the ‘Forest of Dean Writers’ group called ‘If you go down to the woods today’, described as ‘A Dean Witch Project’ This book basically contains ghost stories based around various locations, including mines, in the Forest of Dean  and looks really promising.

I reflected in my last post how helpful I had found the Forest History Society website and this has indirectly generated more information for me to follow-up.  I emailed them to ask specifically about any archive of photographs they may have and was contacted by one of their committee who also happens to be the archivist at the Dean Heritage Centre.  She informed me that they have a huge archive of photographs and information about mining in the Forest and when I told her what I was looking for she suggested I  come in and meet a local historian who volunteers and helps her with cataloguing etc.  He apparently has a wealth of knowledge and stories about mining and miners and so I have arranged to meet him when I come back from Scotland.

Lastly my search for poems. I have managed to access the work of a number of Forest poets but nothing has really inspired me until I heard Rob Hudson talk about what his process and where his inspiration comes from, reflection here.  What came through from this was that Hudson doesn’t attempt to represent a poem or particular piece of writing but used metaphor. He researches the author and tries to understand how that person feels about a particular situation and then attempts to express that.  This may seem to be a subtle distinction but it made a lot of sense to me.  I think for this assignment I will need to try to use some of the stories that John, the historian can talk to me about, or alternatively one of the ghost stories from ‘When you go down to the woods…’, because it is unrealistic to think I can find something, or someone who really gets under my skin, in the timescale I have for assignment 3.  It is something I will pursue and experiment with though and hopefully be able to use for assignment 5.

Exercise 3.6: The Memory of Photography

As always with David Bate’s essays, this was heavy going. There is so much in it and I must confess that I struggled to get my head round, or agree with some of the conclusions he drew. Rather than summaries the points he makes, I am going to try to discuss or challenge my understanding of them.

Bate starts by suggesting there is ambiguity between the memory of photography as a technology that is outmoded and as an ‘aide memoire’. I’m not sure I understand what he means by this. Is he suggesting that interest in archiving has increased because digital photographs need to be archived differently from analogue? Or is he suggesting the we are concerned and possibly confused about the many different types of archives and technologies out there?  I agree that photography has a place in aiding memory and that access may be under threat by some sections of the community with a move to digital archives. Elderly people may be helped to remember faces and events by flicking through a family album but are unlikely to be able to access these same images online.

I fully agree with Sigmund Freud’s quote taken from ‘The Mystic Writing-pad’, having written something down when you think about it, not only acts as an additional ‘artificial ‘ memory in case you forget it later, it allows you to recall accurately something your ‘natural’ memory may have forgotten or distorted. It also allows you (me) to clear your head for fresh thinking, or even sleep – my 2am microwave moments come to mind here. I was interested in Freud’s comments about auxiliary sensory aids taking a similar form to natural organs; the lens of spectacles or a camera having a similar structure to the retina of the eye etc.

I’m not sure I understand Derrida’s argument about technological advances in archiving affecting the ‘inside mental space’ in relation to photography or is he talking about memory in general? In which case, is it maybe about losing what you are not using?  Calculators and mental arithmetic come to mind and spelling and spell checkers in word processing software. Le Goff’s thinking on collective memory is interesting. I hadn’t thought of commemorative stamps, monuments and the like in the same vein as photography in relation to memory but of course they are and are chosen and manipulated to encourage us to remember certain things in a certain way and to give them ‘a precision and a truth never before attained in visual memory‘.  (Le Goff, 1988,quoted in Bate, 2010)

Pierre Bourdiue’s quote about the family album interested me, of course as Bate recognises, the father is not always the photographer and dare I say, many would these days challenge his place as head of the family.  Bourdiue is right on one thing though, there is nothing quite like, particularly with an older person or, say a grand child, sitting going through a family album, reminiscing about different people and places. He is right on another point too. The family album only contains what its author wants to be remembered, happy times, events to be celebrated, so it is not necessarily an accurate history of the family, only part of the truth, rather like Bourdiue’s ‘frequently visited funeral monument’ or the ‘vulgar, Freudianism, repression‘, referred to by Bate.  Photography offers the wider family and social networks a visual means of remembering, identification and documentation.  We are reminded of other archives too that use photographs extensively to aid memory; the state, police military etc., the media, the arts and independent social groups.

I understand the point about archives not just being about the past but about the future, though not for the first time in this text, struggle to relate it specifically to photography. So in simple terms, I have archived copies of important documents; insurance, birth and marriage certificates, wills, etc., not for the purpose of remembering them per se, but because at some point in the future they will be required, if not by me by someone else. I have also have an online archive of all of my photographs, but why?  In case I need them, so that my grandchildren have a record, so that I can pass my history on to future generations? Perhaps I have just answered my own question. Photography is described by Le Goff as one of the most important technological inventions due to its ability to reproduce any other objects visually. So going back to my previous question, I have taken photographs of individual items in my home for insurance purposes. If my clock or a piece of jewellery was stolen, how well would I be able to describe it?  Even with a written description, how accurate would it be, but a photograph will give an accurate representation.  Much more recently than this essay was written, ‘dash cams’ have become a popular accessory in cars and other vehicles, so that if an accident should occur, there is evidence of what happened.

Bate reminds us of the 19th century habit of erecting monuments to dead heroes and refers to Fox Talbot’s choice of photographs for his book, ‘The Pencil of Nature’ (1844-45) for its ability to memorise things for us; Nelson’s monument in construction, his old Oxford College for example. But also his ability to anticipate future uses of photography. According to Bate, Fox Talbot took over 5000 photographs and even without the invention of camera phones, suggests a staggering number of images in archives which this was written in 2010.

Bate questions Foucault’s view that ‘popular’ or human? memory is being obstructed or suppressed by artificial or ancillary apparatuses and asks how images impact on human memory.  ‘Is it that these Artificial Memories create uncertainty for the human faculty of memory, simply because they are ‘memories’ that we have not necessarily experienced, or were experienced in a different way?‘ (Bate, 2010)  I struggle to get my head round this.  Surely a photograph or any other ‘apparatus’ can only generate ‘memories’ for me if I have experienced them in the first place, regardless of whether they are visual memories or not. I can only assume that I have misunderstood something here.  I do appreciate the thinking that some devices, a photograph for example may make us recall things differently and that the use of certain devises may make us forget things we once knew, see my earlier point about mental arithmetic and calculators for example. I think this may be what Freud is getting at in the (Mystic Writing Pad, 430).

Freud’s thoughts about conscious and precocious memory makes sense to me and the idea that we can recall memories at will from pre-conscious to conscious and then ‘temporarily forget’ again so that it is not clogging up conscious space. I can also identity with ‘screen’ memories and remembering unimportant things rather than those that matter.  I also understand the points made about voluntary and involuntary memory and the strange reaction one can have to certain images for no reason they can immediately understand. Bate goes on to explain why, in his case, his involuntary memory of his childhood in Portsmouth could have caused the reaction he had to Fox Talbot’s photograph of the Nelson monument. Interestingly, I was strangely drawn to a series of photographs I first saw in an exhibition in Edinburgh last year, by a photographer I had not heard of before called Margaret Mitchell.  I revisited her work again recently here.  Although I didn’t realise it at the time, the photographs were made near where I grew up and generated a number of memories from that time.

Bate concludes by saying that ‘with photographs, memory is both fixed and fluid, social and personal’. They do not offer historical fact but rather a subjective perception which needs to be analysed rather than just accepted as fact.

Sources:

Bate, D. (2010) ‘The Memory of Photography’ In: photographies 3 (2) pp.243–257. [online] At: https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609 [Accessed on 25 January 2019]

Rob Hudson talk at The Gallery at Home

I first came across conceptual photographer, Rob Hudson when I visited ‘Out of the Woods of Thought’ exhibition at the ‘Argentia Gallery’, Birmingham just before Christmas, reflection here. I was intrigued and drawn in by the intensity of the images from his ‘Mametz Wood’ series, so when I saw that Hudson was talking about his work at ‘The Gallery at Home’, in Usk, I booked a place.

The Gallery at Home is a small, intimate space in what I believe was originally a cow shed, in a business park just outside Usk. There were 12 of us including Rob and our hostess Sonia; all artists of one discipline or another, all happy to talk and share experiences and a really warm feeling emanated from this group.

Rob Hudson is one of the four founding members of ‘Inside the Outside’, a collective of like-minded, yet very different landscape photographers, whose latest exhibition I referred to above. Rob started of by telling us a little about himself, how his photography stemmed from his love of walking and how everything changed for him about 10 years ago when he stopped taking photographs for other people and started making photographs for himself. This was the first of many lessons I took away from this session. He talked about his inspirations, mostly poets, or writers of some sort, before taking us through 5 of his photographic projects.

Dark places feature in much of Hudson’s work which is hardly surprising given its inspiration.

The madness of John Clare, for example is the inspiration for North Towards the Orison as Clare walked from the asylum in Epping Forest where he had been incarcerated back to his home in the Fens. The colourful yet dark slightly blurred images suggest fighting my way through a thick tangle of trees and branches but there is often just a little light up ahead to make me keep going.

From North towards the Orison © Rob Hudson

Mametz Wood, the site of the First World War battle where thousands of lives were lost is recounted by David Jones in his poem, ‘In Parentheses’, long after the war that was is over. This is the starting point for Rob Hudson’s project of the same name in which he explored the effects of war on the mind.  Jones suffered from PTSD, or shell shock as it was known then and 20 plus years on he is still plagued enough by the experiences to write about it.

 

From ‘Songlines’, 2015 ©Rob Hudson

Songlines is quite different. The influence here is Bruce Chatwin’s book of the same name in which the author writes about a trip to Australia in order to research Aboriginal song. Rather than interpreting the dark words and mind of a poet, Songlines is about the ‘delight of looking below the surface of things’  (Hudson, 2015) Or about the fact that we so often overlook what is right in front of us.  Rob explained that these abstract images were all photographs of the bark of trees using colour negative film.  According to Chatwin, ’A ’song’ is both a map and a direction finder. Provided you knew the song you could always find your way across country’. (Chatwin, 1987 quoted by Hudson, 2015)

Double, or at least multiple exposure is used extensively in Hudson’s work with several images being processed and layered in Photoshop.

From Songs of Travel © Rob Hudson

The image on the screen when we went into the gallery, above, consists of 37 separate images, taken as Hudson walked round this island. Many of his photographs are taken as he walks, using a tripod to keep horizons straight.  I find the process quite fascinating but totally logical because if you are looking and seeing as you walk, the views will be fluid. Once again I wish I was more competent with Photoshop and whilst I have no intention of trying to copy Rob Hudson’s work there are so many processes, ideas and inspirations here to take away and experiment with.

Rob Hudson doesn’t just take a poem of passage from literature and attempt to depict it in his work. He uses metaphor. He gets to know the person that wrote it. So when asked if the poetry came first and then the photographs, his reply was that it was more complicated than that, it is about telling stories about how that person felt; ruminating about mental health issues and finding ways to express his feelings about it – so there is another lesson to take away.  Another valuable and very current lesson for me was that none of this work is made in the places that inspired it. In his website introduction to Mametz Woods, Hudson says, ‘This isn’t the actual wood. Nor is it July 1916, the date of the First World War battle of that name that claimed thousands of lives in a futile fight for just one square mile of woodland in northern France’. In  fact all of these projects are photographed in the woods near his home in Cardiff.  I say this is a current and relevant lesson because I am currently researching assignment 3 which I intend to base on old coal mines in the Forest of Dean. It had been my intention to try to find old photographs of mines where I could identify the location so and go back and shoot in the same place as it is now.  I have also been searching, unsuccessfully, for poetry or stories or music about mining in the Forest of Dean which I could draw on for inspiration but I realise, having listened to Rob Hudson that the actual location doesn’t matter, it is the feelings and emotions that the stories generate that is important and they could come from any former mining community – South Wales or Yorkshire for example.

I reflected after visiting ‘Out of the Woods of Thought’ that it was without doubt, the most inspiring and useful exhibition I had seen in a long time and I would add Rob Hudson’s talk to this list.  I find Hudson’s website one of the most useful and user-friendly too, mainly because each project has an ‘about’ section, so you can see where the inspiration comes from and I find that quite important.  This talk has made me really question my own practice and think about how I approach things. It has also given me resources to explore, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines for example, a Photoshop workshop at the beginning of February and the life and work of Forest Poet FW Harvey is also on order.

Lastly the gallery. I have added my email to the list of names so that I get information about future events and will also look out  for the ‘artist days’ that Sonia, the gallery owner talked about setting up.  They sound a little like the SW OCA groups and I think accessing a network outside of the college framework would be worthwhile too.

Sources:

Rob Hudson (s.d.) At: http://www.robhudsonlandscape.net/ [Accessed on 23 January 2019]

Home – Inside the Outside (s.d.) At: https://www.inside-the-outside.com/ [Accessed on 23 January 2019]

Work in the Woods: Dean’s Industrial Legacy (2002) [Accessed 25 January 2019]

Poetry By Heart | In Parenthesis – Part 7, pages 183-186 (s.d.) At: http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/in-parenthesis-leave-it-under-the-oak/ [Accessed on 25 January 2019]

@galleryathome • Instagram photos and videos (s.d.) At: https://www.instagram.com/galleryathome/ [Accessed on 23 January 2019]

The Songlines (2017) In: Wikipedia. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Songlines&oldid=811460877 [Accessed on 25 January 2019]

Assignment 3 research

Inspired by Matt White’s session at last week’s SW OCA meeting, I have spent the last couple of days making a start on researching assignment 3 which at this point in time, I am thinking will focus on old mines in the Forest of Dean, though it what way, I’m not yet sure.  Why mines in the Forest of Dean?  At the beginning of the project, ‘Origins of picturesque’ (OCA, 2013), we were referred to ‘Gilpin’s guide to the Wye Valley’ and informed that ‘The little brown ‘viewpoints’ icons of Ordinance Survey maps are a legacy of Gilpin’, ibid.

My search for brown tourist signs on the internet resulted in information about how to apply for one, the costs and criteria, where I could get a brown sign made and a website called ‘Follow the Brown Signs’.  From this website, I learned that at the time of writing, which, going by the last blog post was pre 2015, there were 93 officially recognised brown signs symbols so clearly I had to narrow this down. I decided to focus on two, industrial heritage and viewpoint. 

 

 

 

This coincided with my working on exercise 3.5: Local History which was aimed at developing research skills and required me to investigate an historical aspect of the area I lived in.  The main industry in the Forest of Dean where I live, was in the past, mining and that seemed the obvious route for me to follow. That exercise can be found here and as a result of that I arranged to view some of the resources I had found on mining in the online catalogue of my local record office.

In the meantime, the focus of OCA tutor, Matt White’s session at last week’s South West meeting, reflection here, was research and so I opted to use Matt’s ‘research cycle’ as a means of systematically recording the process of researching this assignment and rather than try to record it retrospectively as I have done in the past, I would write it down as I go along – I have already discovered that I need a larger piece of paper!

My visit to the archives was useful in that one of the archivists I talked to knows the Forest well and was able to help me narrow down my search. Just as well because the set of maps I had ordered just showed how extensive mining in the Forest was.  The main map, shown here is an index map and summary of 16 other maps or plans which could be put together to form a whole. Totally overwhelming from my point of view.

From the digital mapping project, ‘Know your Place’, I was able to locate 3 of the old collieries that the archivist had told me about.  This is a brilliant facility whereby one can use a slider to move the map from the present day back in time and so see the landmarks as they were then. This has allowed me to see where some of the old mine shafts were.

 

From the Forest of Dean Local History society I have found more information about each of these sites and walking maps for two of the areas.  I have ordered some more documents and sheets of photographs from the record office and will view those next week. It is also my intention to visit Hopewell Colliery Museum which is now actually on the middle of the 3 maps above, the owner of which is a freeminer.  My other action for this coming week is to try to find some poetry or literature about mining in the Forest, myths or legends and some information about freeminging and if and how I could use the product of these mines, coal, in my assignment.  My starting point for that will be the local library.

Sources:

Know Your Place – Gloucestershire (s.d.) At: http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/kyp/?edition=glos [Accessed on 19 January 2019]

Follow the brown signs (s.d.) At: http://www.followthebrownsigns.com/ [Accessed on 19 January 2019]

 

Photography, memory and place

I find the idea of using memory and the family album a source of inspiration quite interesting and although I have yet to go down this route yet myself, I know other OCA students have used their family photograph very successfully in their work.

Trish Morrissey’s work is particularly engaging because. Not only does she use her family album to recreate scenes from her childhood, both real, from memory and imagined but she drawn on history and research to create her interpretation of the lives of others too.  Three projects in particular caught my attention; ‘A certain slant of light’, ‘Six scenes’ and ‘Eliza’, all of which are based around Hestercombe House in Somerset, where I was fortunate enough to see Helen Sear’s exhibition, Prospect Refuge Hazard 2, and attended the related seminar, ‘Disrupted Views’ where Helen talked about her work.  Trish Morrissey spent a year-long residency at Hestercombe in 2017 and it was during this time that she made these works.  ‘A certain slant of light’ (2017) is based on the lives of two women who ran Hestercombe at different times in the 18th and 19th centuries. Elizabeth Maria Tyndale Warre (1790-1872)  and The Hon Mrs Constance Portman (1854-1951) were both quite eccentric, Miss Warre, never married, made her own clothes and didn’t care what people thought of her and Mrs Portman widowed whilst still quite young, would not allow the servants to look her in the eye but liked her ladies maid to stroke her feet with a feather to help her to sleep. Morrissey says of the work:

‘Crossing the disciplines of performance and photography I drew on extensive archive material such as photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, letters and testimonies. Combining fact, fiction and fantasy, and playing all the roles myself, my films and photographs are based on my interpretation of the lives of these extraordinary women’ (Morrissey, 2017)

One of the things that interested me is that Trish Morrissey plays all the parts herself. In the short film that follows, in which she is interviewed about the project, she explains her thinking behind this decision and how it freed her up so that she didn’t have to worry about ethics, exploitation or actors turning up.  In her words, she could do exactly what she liked. She also explains how the archive material she found formed the basis of the idea which she then embellished with her own imagination.

 

This may not be as relevant to this section of the course as the re-creation of her childhood photographs in which she also plays other family members herself but it is food for thought none the less and I was quite fascinated in how she managed to add character and personality to these two women

It was quite difficult to find much on the internet about the other artists discussed in the materials, most it seems, do not have their own websites these days.  I found references used by other students, for example for Peter Kane from online magazine, Source, but could not find the article myself.

Margaret Mitchell’s work, like Morrissey’s, may not fit the criteria for this activity exactly but again I found it interesting.  Her work invariably links people to their environment and comments on the social circumstances they find themselves in and certainly in some of her projects, memory features strongly.  In 1994. Mitchell documented the day-to-day lives of her sister and her family, living in a the most deprived and run down housing estate in Stirling, my home town.  According to Mitchell,

”Family’ (1994) developed from beliefs on the stigmatisation of certain strands of society. The photographs feature the daily lives of my sister Andrea and her three children Steven, Kellie and Chick as they navigated their lives in difficult emotional and socio-economic circumstances’. (Mitchell, 1994)

Twenty years later, Mitchell’s sister has died and she revisits the direction the three children have taken in ‘In this Place’, (2016-17). Of this project she says;

‘In This Place’ raises questions about choice—do we have choices in life, or are some predetermined and made for us? It becomes clear that a ‘place’ can be both mental and physical; a place we put ourselves and where we are put, sometimes by others and sometimes by circumstance. Being told what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot achieve. From society, from family, from self. (Mitchell, 2018)

I first saw Margaret Mitchell’s work at an exhibition in Edinburgh last year called ‘When we were young’, review here, and although I didn’t reflect on it extensively at the time, I have followed her work ever since.  The three short videos that accompany the photographs on Margaret Mitchell’s website pull the projects together as they alternate between photographs of the three subjects as children and as adults and Mitchell’s narrative adds another level of understanding of their situation.

There are several things that interest me personally about these two projects in particular and they have to do with memory – my memory.  The Raploch is not a place I was allowed to go except on a Thursday for youth club in the Catholic Church, when my father dropped me off and picked me up again afterwards.  We didn’t mix with the people who lived in the Raploch, in any case, very few of them went to the High School, most, who went to school at all went to Riverside, the secondary modern. So my memory of the place is about the stereotypes that Mitchell explores in her project. I find this very relevant as I work my way through David Bate’s essay which is the focus of the next exercise.

I was interested to see that these two projects are being exhibited again at the Format Festival in Derby in March when I will have an opportunity to explore them further.

Sources:

Trish Morrissey (s.d.) At: http://www.trishmorrissey.com/index.html [Accessed on 9 January 2019]

Trish Morrissey – A certain slant of light, 2017. (2018) Directed by Hestercombe. At: https://vimeo.com/266125282 [Accessed on 17 January 2019]

Family (s.d.) At: https://margaretmitchell.co.uk/family/ [Accessed on 16 January 2019]

Margaret Mitchell: In This Place (2018) At: https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/03/royal-photographic-society-international-photography-exhibition-2018/ [Accessed on 16 January 2019]

In This Place videos (s.d.) At: https://margaretmitchell.co.uk/in-this-place-videos/ [Accessed on 16 January 2019]

Reflections on the South West OCA group meeting 12 Jan 19

I must confess to having had mixed feelings coming up to Saturday’s South West OCA meeting because whilst I was really looking forward to Matt White’s session I was beginning to feel ‘managed’ if that is the right word.

Anna’s quiet and understated but nonetheless efficient way of organising the meetings (and its attendees) is now in the past as she comes towards the end of her course, and I don’t think I will be the only person to miss her. It is already obvious that those who have stood up to take her place will do things very differently and maybe it is just a question of getting used to that.  Tutor led sessions are being organised but we have lost our ‘in between’ student led meetings, which I really appreciated as we always had more time for informal discussion about our work than we have in the tutor led sessions.  Attendance was usually slightly lower at these meetings, the notable absentees being textiles and creative writing students but those of us who did go got a great deal from them. Distance is always an issue too. I am probably the farthest north so can spend more time travelling than at the meetings themselves when the venue is Paignton or Plymouth but the same can be said for students travelling from Wales, Cornwall or Dorset to Bristol. It is really a question of how much we value the sessions and how badly we want to attend. Whenever we hear OCA tutors talk about the student collaboration, the South West group is held up as the example to follow and at least one other regional group has been set up on our model, or at least previous model, and I worry that we may be in danger of losing some of the friendship, collaboration and empathy that has derived from these meetings.

So to Saturday’s meeting. Matt White was an inspiration as I knew he would be and so enthusiastic about his work. His topic was research but he took us through the making of a project which began with a question about how capitalism originated, through the historic trade routes between Europe and the East, to the flower market at Aalsmeer and eventually to the Turkish mountains in search of a specific tulip which is indigenous to that area. We learned about his ‘research cycle’ from the initial inspiration through the resulting actions and review and that the process was repeated as many times as it takes to reach the final outcome, a 38 minute film in this case which can be found on Matt’s website, here.

A number of messages came out of this session for me:

• Research can start from anywhere or any question
• You don’t have to know what you are aiming for, probably better if you don’t
• It is better to approach the project with a completely open mind with no preconceptions about the outcome – this is definitely where I fall down
• Allow yourself to be guided by what you find and explore as many avenues as interest you
• Research should help you eliminate options as well as which to follow
• Research is an ongoing part of the work
• The making of the work itself and the experimenting along the way is all research
• Research can be anything you do as part of the process

On a personal level, my most successful OCA project to date was my last documentary assignment, both in terms of the finished result and personal satisfaction. Without a doubt the reason for this was the research I undertook, not just at the start but throughout the whole work. My only issue was that I kept having to remind myself that I had a photographic assignment to complete because I got so drawn into the correspondence I found in Gloucestershire Record Office,  Salts Healthcare archive and the work being undertaken by the Vale of Berkeley Railway Society. There were so many different directions that project could have gone in given time and opportunity and Matt’s research cycle makes a lot of sense when I look back on this project. One of the things that Matt White said that struck a chord with me was that his research told him what he didn’t want to produce, which was photographs of pretty flowers and I can identify with that entirely. In my final submission for this assignment I wrote, ‘When I started this project, I had no idea where it would take me but as my research continued, I realised I did not want to present a nostalgic story of a long-lost transport system; rather this was large heavy machinery, dangerous in the wrong hands and accidents such as this were commonplace.’ (Bryson, 2018).  Just reflecting back on this now, I can see that most of my learning points above were true for this project – all I need to do is keep the momentum going!

Both of my landscape assignments to date have involved research but where I have fallen short in both cases is that I had the end in mind when I started the projects.  One of the management models we used to recommend when I was training School Business Management students was Steven Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Successful People’, the second habit of which is ‘Begin with the end in mind’.  Old habits die hard and I jokingly refer to my accountancy and business management background as being a barrier to creativity. Certainly risk taking does not come easily to me and reflecting on Saturday’s session, I realise that I still have a lot of ‘unlearning’ to do.  I am just beginning to think about assignment 3 and so far without a clear idea of the direction it will take. I have however started research for this and have arranged to view some documents at the Gloucester record office next week – the start of the cycle. One of the suggestions that my documentary tutor made as a result of my last assignment for that course was to chart my research methodology using a process map. Last time I used a sort of flow diagram but this time I will give Matt White’s research cycle a go.  One book I found extremely useful when working on my last documentary project was ‘Photographers and Research: the role of research in contemporary photographic practice’, by Sheila Read and Mike Simmons published in 2017. It consists of a series of case studies and essays written by different practitioners and I found it practical and accessible so that has been pulled off the shelf once again.

The afternoon session

There were 11 or 12 of us with work for critique so we had the usual 15 or so minutes but boy does that fly by. I was not responsible for note-taking or photographs this  time so I was able just to listen what people had to say and as usual there was a real mix of work and stages of stuckness.  Anna passed round some of the prints she has made for her final exhibition in July and also progress so far on her quilt. Not all of the suggestions were practical but that didn’t matter and I hope she got something out of it.  For me, I could see Matt White’s research cycle in practice with Anna’s project because it has evolved throughout the time she has been working on it, informed by the research she has undertaken and what we have now is quite different from what she started with. Krystyna is further developing her paintings of Sally which she submitted for the Osmosis exhibition whilst Eliza caused some hilarity with her first attempts at trying to decide what constitutes a sculpture.   I wanted some feedback on my second assignment which I really want to re-do because, to my mind the quality of outcome is not good enough.  The general consensus was that the images are fine, this was an experiment and I should submit it as such. I explained the rules I had set myself and the fact that I wanted some element of surprise or uncertainty in the images and that I knew that I had to simplify my ‘rules’.  Matt’s view was that by deciding on exactly when and where I would take my photographs, I had already decided on what I wanted. I was asked why I had chosen the route I did and the suggestion was made that maybe I should just get on the first train to wherever and shoot every so many minutes regardless of a timetable.  All of this made complete sense but for whatever reason, I just needed other people to say what I probably already knew. So I will re-shoot this assignment at the earliest opportunity although and I will try hard to let go and just shoot every couple of minutes.  Whether I will be able just to get on the first train or not remains to be seen!

As always I came away buzzing, my head full of ideas and where to go from here. By Sunday morning though, my mood had taken a dive. Here I am, more than half way though level 2 and still stuggling with the confidence to be free and easy, experiment and go with whatever the results happen to be without beating myself up.  Maybe I’m just fooling myself that I can do this and should just go back precise known outcomes or maybe I’m just scared of losing my safety net of trusted peers that I can use as sounding boards without being made to feel stupid. Or maybe its just January blues and I just need to go out and take some photographs.

Sources:

Projects (s.d.) At: http://www.matt-white.org/projects.html [Accessed on 14 January 2019]

annebrysondoc.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/assignment-5-final-version/ [Accessed 14 January 2018]

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (s.d.) At: https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits.html [Accessed on 14 January 2019]

Read, S. and Simmons, M. (2017) Photographers and research: the role of research in contemporary photographic practice. New York and London: Routledge.

Exploration of New Fancy site

The problem with having a taste of the assignment before I have finished the coursework is that I become impatient, particularly when the next exercise is quite a tough read.

That has certainly been the case after exercise 3.5, here, which required me to undertake some preliminary research which could be used for assignment 3. So today, having felt better than I have in a week and needing to get outdoors, I decided to take a trip to New Fancy, the site of a former coal mine in the Forest of Dean, discovered as part of that preliminary research.  This trip was still very much part of my research because having found information about New Fancy on the Forest of Dean local history society website, here, I worried that this location might be too touristy for my assignment even though I had not heard much about it before.  I knew that a Geo map had been created in 2008 along with a memorial to Forest miners who lost their lives and that there was a picnic site and view-point.

In the event, I was really pleasantly surprised. Although there is ample parking and the features mentioned above are obvious, the development of New Fancy into an ‘Amenity site’ in the 1970s was undertaken sympathetically and you don’t have to venture far to be back in the depth of the Forest again.  There was plenty of evidence of visits by local residents…

….the Geo map is not in your face

….and the view from the top is very natural, I’m sure stunning on a clear day and in the autumn

There are a couple of information boards and numerous walks leading off from the car park and from what I can gather, lots of other evidence of the old mines, made safe but apart  from that, pretty much as they were, scattered throughout the area. I didn’t venture too far today as I was on my own, apart from Isla, and I’m not sure how a westie would stand up to a wild boar but I felt it was a worthwhile journey.  I still have some research to carry out before I make a final decision about assignment 3, for example there are still some free mines operational in the Forest and I’d like to explore that further.  Then there is the St Briavels Hundred, though hundred what I am not quite sure; something to do with the division of parishes I think. So next week, after I have finished my reading, it will be a trip to the Dean Heritage Museum and Gloucestershire archives and then I can really get started – really looking forward to it.

Sources:

Mining (s.d.) At: https://www.forestofdeanhistory.org.uk/forest-history/mining/ [Accessed on 6 January 2019]

Exercise 3.5: Local History

I started my preliminary research for assignment 3 a few weeks ago and although I am not yet ready to make final decisions about my assignment, this exercise builds on that nicely. We are asked to conduct a short investigation into some historic aspect of the area in which we live – in my case the Forest of Dean.  Early thoughts focused around brown tourist signs, in particular, viewpoints or historic sites but I quickly found that there are many more than I had anticipated covering all sorts of tourist attractions and with no real directory of where I might find them.  I found guidance from the local authority and an application form for applying to have a sign erected which included some quite broad categories and the requirements that needed to be met. Perhaps more useful was the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley Tourist site as at least this included a section on ‘Culture and Heritage’ and a ‘self drive’ guide to places of interest in the Forest.  Most useful of all thiugh, was is a blog by someone called Amanda, who has, or at least had, a thing about brown signs. I say had because the last post on her blog was September 2015. From this site I established that there are 93 symbols that make up the officially recognised sites and facilities…

Screenshot from Amanda’s website

… and that I could enter a post code or location to find brown signs in my area.  This is as far as I got at this point but I promised myself that I would return to this when I was ready to take my assignment further.

My thinking for this assignment, Spaces to Places is that I will focus on one or more local places of interest, maybe viewpoints or something to do with the industrial heritage of the Forest – coal mining for example and ideally, photograph the signs leading to these places as well as the places themselves.  The Forest of Dean and Wye Valley tourist site was a good starting point  for viewpoints just as this exercise is a good starting point for the industrial heritage.

So today I visited the main library in Gloucester in search of information on the coal mining industry in the Forest of Dean. Apart from a book entitles ‘The Forest in Old Photographs’ by Humphrey Phelps, which includes a small section entitled ‘Occupational’ and an audio CD of the Forest of Dean Heritage Trail, apparently intended to be used as a self drive, guide, I drew a blank.  Perhaps the library in Coleford, the main town in the Forest will be a better option.

An internet search on Coal mining in the Forest of Dean proved to be much more fruitful, in particular the Forest of Dean Local History Society website where I found information about ‘mines and quarries’ a geo map of an old mine at ‘New Fancy, that I didn’t know existed, information about all the iron mines, coal mines and major quarries that existed and lots of links to take this research further. 

My other source of research at the moment is the Gloucestershire Archives which I used quite extensively in my last assignment for the Documentary course.  The procedure with the archives is that, having joined, I can go online to their catalogue, enter search criteria and it brings up a list of resources that match. I then need to decide what I want to see and submit an order to view, giving two or three days notice of my visit.  As with any search, the more detail you can give the better; my intial search on ‘coal mining in the forest of dean’ brought up 25 results … …so I will need to work through those and decide what will be most useful as I can only view 3 resources at a time, my initial thoughts are that maps showing the locations of the mines might be a good starting point. I know this will not be a quick and easy process. When researching Gloucester Docks railway for my last documentary assignment, I ended up by discarding much more of the information I gathered than I actually used. One of the key lessons I learned from that project was that the research took far more time than taking the photographs themselves but it was the research that informed which photographs I needed to take. All I need to do now is finish the rest of part 3 coursework and then I can really make a start on my assignment.

Sources:

Follow the brown signs (s.d.) At: http://www.followthebrownsigns.com/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Official site for the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley (s.d.) At: http://www.wyedeantourism.co.uk/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Culture and Heritage – Official site for the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley (s.d.) At: http://www.wyedeantourism.co.uk/heritage [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Yat, S. (s.d.) ‘Just around the corner from the Royal Forest Route’ p.2.

My adventures along The Brown Sign Way | Follow The Brown Signs (s.d.) At: http://www.followthebrownsigns.com/blog/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Mining (s.d.) At: https://www.forestofdeanhistory.org.uk/forest-history/mining/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Online Catalogue – Gloucestershire Archives (s.d.) At: https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/online-catalogue/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Industrial Landscapes

Having struggled a little with the last project I feel much more enthusiastic about this one and looking forward towards the exercise at the end of the piece, I feel quite excited to move on. This is exactly what I need to get my mojo working again!

I first came across John Davies at the Liverpool Biennial in 2014 but the photographs he exhibited there were quite different from those described in this part of the course notes, in fact I had to search his website to find any reference to them.   ‘Turning Green to Brown’ was a project undertaken by Davies, to highlight the potential loss of Sefton Park Meadows, if the local authority got their way and sold it off for housing.   Apart from being shot in colour whereas most of his work is in black and white, the photographs were also shot at normal eye level rather than the high viewpoints of much of his recent work. I am considering something related to mining in the Forest of Dean for assignment 4 and John Davies industrial landscapes might serve as a useful reference point although, as Liz Wells suggests in the course notes, his picturesque views and high viewpoints are quite different from what I am likely to find in the Forest!

I found James Morris work really interesting as from one project to the next it was quite different; from landscapes barely visible in some of his Antarctic work to the lavish interior of Catholic churches in Chicago to the back streets of Venice and the quite varied landscapes of Wales.  The Wales and Venice projects in particular give a sense of the diversity of the places – not just what the tourists see of Venice but the graffiti and rubbish in the back streets on a grey day, whilst in Wales, a dam on the Elan Valley, to the grey roofs of Blaenau Ffestiniog to the port at Holyhead to Portmerion Village, give a much truer picture of the landscape than simply showing the run down mining villages or the dramatic slopes of Snowdon.  The one thing I did find incredibly frustrating about James Morris’ website though was the slow pace of navigation. Perhaps it is intended to make you slow down and view the images properly but I just wanted to wind it on a little faster!

I was unable to access the link given in the course materials for Patrick Shanahan’s work, Paradeisos on the Ffotogallery site and his own website only shows 2 projects, ‘A Momentary Presence’, which does show some industrial landscapes and  ‘Every Once in a While’, which seems to be more portraits. The landscapes, mostly taken abroad, whilst being quite derelict, are all very bright and to me at least, are more in keeping with the modern trend of photographing old derelict hospitals and nursing homes, rather than post industrial landscapes as I would recognise them. Maybe I need to be more open-minded but I didn’t get what I was looking for here which is what? Maybe what is happening now, post industrial, in places where coal was mined and steel produced or ships build or wool woven.

I found the references and link to the urban exploration videos quite bizarre. As I have indicated above, I am very familiar with the current trend for photographing urban decay; groups of people going into disused hospitals, schools, old manor houses, often abroad, running the gauntlet of security guards and often bribing then in order to get photographs which are then frequently over processed in a harsh HRD style. Rather this video showed three middle class, (their description, I would rather say arrogant and irresponsible) young men bragging about going into ‘places other people don’t go’; sewers, drains, disused tube tunnels – as well as some in use.  One saying that they take calculated risks and this if someone was hurt or died as a result of watching this video, HE WOULD BE SAD!! But that if you are a mature adult you use your common sense. Unfortunately many of the people watching this may not be ‘mature adults.’ Yes they take photographs and yes if caught they are sometimes charged with criminal trespass rather than ordinary trespass but it is really just about the adventure! Maybe it really is time I moved on!

Before I do though, one internet search revealed a film and photography collective called Amber, initially set up to document  ‘working class and marginalised lives and landscapes in North East England‘ (Amber website, 2019) Now though, their focus is further reaching and this is where I found Richard Grassick and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and their involvement in a series, commissioned by Amber called the Coalfield Stories which was planned to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the national miners strike.  Grassick’s work compares the lives of four Durham ex-miners families with people in a similar situation in post industrial Bremerhaven in Germany.  I’m not sure why the Durham miners images were shot in black and white whilst the German ones are in colour unless to stress that the German workers still had jobs and everything that goes with that.  In the main, Grassick’s photographs, at least the Durham ones, are more documentary than landscape but to me that doesn’t matter, they still struck a chord with me, maybe I am still in semi documentary mode.

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen is a Finnish born photographer who has lived and worked in England for many years. The Coal Coast was the first of her works produced in colour because colour was necessary to show the vivid colours created by the chemical pollution on the beaches she was photographing

Title: The Coal Coast Hawthorn Hive, afternoon 31 May 2000. Pool of water on a raised plateau of pit waste; piece of flexipipe; boulders coloured with iron oxides. © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

These are strange thought provoking photographs, beautiful, some fairly traditional coastal scenes, some showing the remains of architecture, old piers, remains of boats, rusting iron chains, dead birds but the thing that sets them apart is the unnatural colour – another side effect of the industrial age.

There is more of John Davies’ work too on this site – really glad I found it.

Sources:

Turning Green to Brown – Sefton Park Meadows (2014) At: https://www.redeye.org.uk/exhibitions/turning-green-brown-sefton-park-meadows [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

John Davies Photographer – home page (s.d.) At: http://www.johndavies.uk.com/ [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Venice | James Morris (s.d.) At: https://www.jamesmorris.info/portfolio/venice-2/ [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

A Landscape of Wales | James Morris (s.d.) At: https://www.jamesmorris.info/portfolio/landscape-wales/ [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Portfolios (s.d.) At: https://www.shanahanphotos.com/f447448386 [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Crack The Surface – Episode I. (2011) Directed by SilentUK. At: https://vimeo.com/26200018  [Accessed on 3 January 2019]

Coalfield Stories index | | guardian.co.uk Arts (s.d.) At: https://www.theguardian.com/arts/pictures/0,,1649941,00.html [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

The Coal Coast – Amber Collection (s.d.) At: https://www.amber-online.com/collection/the-coal-coast/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Durham Coalfield – Amber Collection (s.d.) At: https://www.amber-online.com/collection/durham-coalfield/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Whetstone, D. (s.d.) Aftermath of industrial decline – The Journal. At: http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/theatre/aftermath-of-industrial-decline-4643547 [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

Post Industrial – Amber Collection (s.d.) At: https://www.amber-online.com/collection/post-industrial/ [Accessed on 4 January 2019]

First real thoughts about Assignment 4

When I submitted assignment 3 to my tutor I was meant also, to submit a proposal for assignment 4’s critical review but to be honest nothing really grabbed me and I was beginning to panic. At each stage of the course so far, there have been issues I thought I could maybe explore further, the whole idea of the sublime for example or a particular photographer or artist that inspired me but nothing felt as though I could really put my heart and soul into it.

Over the last few days I have been quite poorly, today is the first time in since returning from Scotland that I’ve actually had a shower and got dressed (not as smelly as that sounds) and am starting to feel human again! What I have done over that time though is some coursework and reading. Nothing heavy; a couple of articles in the latest BJP, some photographers referred to in the course materials and some that I follow on Twitter or Instagram. The one thing that keeps surfacing in my mind, and now that I think about it, has niggled away since the start of this course, is the use of text with photography and art. Does it add to or detract from the photograph or the story? I’m not talking about titles or captions but artists statements, introductory essays and/or text in the work itself.

Earlier on when exploring Richard Long’s work I reflected that I couldn’t quite see that making a statement, such as the factual details of a journey could be seen as art, although of course it is if literature or poetry. Then I found myself exploring further, gaining more understanding of where he was coming from and applying some of his thinking to my own work on assignment 2 and thinking back further to assignment 1, realised that I had included images which only included text. An exhibition I saw whilst on holiday in Avignon in the autumn, here, also focused quite heavily in  text.  I didn’t understand them all but some of them intrigued me, this on for example although sadly, I have not recorded the name of the artist.

The image of the walking man, which can faintly be seen on the screen, consists of text, although it was moving so fast that it was difficult to read.

The only information card in this gallery referred to Daniel Buren’s stripy boards and having explored Buren’s work, whist he certainly uses light and sculptural elements, I can’t see anything including text.  It did occur to me that Richard Long, who also had work in this exhibition might have been responsible but I can’t find anything like this on his website.  The lesson here is to take note, even if you don’t think it is important at the time!

The reason I mention this now is that only this morning as I browsed through Twitter, a tweet by Joseph Wright, whom I came across for the first time when I visited ‘Out of the Woods of Thought’ exhibition in Birmingham at the beginning of December, which I reflected on here  when I was very taken by his ‘The Floods’ project.  About to set out on a 21 mile walk over a couple of days, Wright included a map of his route and another where the interior of the map is filled in with text, in the same way as the walking figure in the above image.  I used a map in my last assignment and intend to do so in assignment 3, perhaps this is why Wright’s tweet struck a chord with me.

Just before Christmas I was going through Fay Godwin’s ‘Land’ and ‘Secret Forest’ of Dean’ and felt that regardless on any captions the images may of may not have had, the introductory texts, in the case of the Forest book, Edna Healey and in Land,  John Fowles and Ian Jeffrey, added another level of meaning to the work.  Then again as I explored Willie Doherty’s Derry project in the last few days, had it not been for the text, I would not have appreciated what was at the heart of this work.

Only this morning I was reading an article in the current edition of BJP, where Colin Pantall talks about Matthew Genitempo’s first book, ‘Jasper’, described as ‘a poetic exploration of the American landscape and the people who seek peace within its grasp’ (Pantall, 2018)  Genitempo chooses not to include text saying ‘…people want answer. Who is this, what is  that, where is this? But it doesn’t really add any value to the work’ (Genitempo, 2018, cited in Pantall, 2018) That said, I did find the article, which of course explains the background, very helpful in understanding the work.

Text does seem to be quite a personal thing which is why I think it might be worth exploring further for my critical review. It is a huge subject of course so I will need to think further about how I can make it manageable but it is a start.

Sources:

Wright, J. (2019) Early start, the ‘blue hour’, for the first of many perambulations in ‘19. This the first, is 21 miles to be completed over 2 days… A survey of the Manor of Purton from AD796pic.twitter.com/EJ1dJhveto. [Tweet] At: https://twitter.com/JoeARWright/status/1080368213995765760 [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Pantall, C. (2019) ‘Jasper’ In: British Journal of Photography (7880) February 2019 pp.50–66.

Jasper (s.d.) At: https://www.matthewgenitempo.com/jasper/ [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Daniel Buren – Exhibits (s.d.) At: https://danielburen.com/exhibits/personnelle [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Daniel Buren – Pages (s.d.) At: https://danielburen.com/ [Accessed on 2 January 2019]

Daniel Buren Overview and Analysis (s.d.) At: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-buren-daniel.htm [Accessed on 2 January 2019]