Roots & Wings Photography – Press Release

I have some photography work in this exhibition.  The show tours Crawley, Barbados and Brighton throughout 2012.

PRESS RELEASE

The innovative programme is designed create opportunities for sharing, networking and learning for artists from diverse backgrounds, through international creative exchanges. The project has been developed as a response to the upcoming residency of the Barbados and other Caribbean Olympic teams in the UK prior to the 2012 Games. It will feature a parallel arts programme that will take place at different international sites – transmitted to and from each location. The vision foris to dynamically engage communities from the host and visiting countries in a range of exciting events to celebrate heritage, culture and to promote intercultural exchange.

Kicking off with the touring Roots & Wings photography exhibition, these satellite events will bring together international creative collaborators and audiences in a groundbreaking mixture of live and cyberspace activities,
alongside a series of creative workshops, screenings, exhibitions, publications and performances.

Roots & Wings Programme

• 12 – 24 February 2012 @ The Hawth, Crawley, UK
• 23 March – 5 April @ Steel Shed, Barbados
• May 2012 @ Brighton Festival Fringe, UK
• October 2012 @ Brighton Photo Fringe Biennale, UK

UK: 12 – 24 February will be virtually linked to 2 other Caribbean visual art exhibitions:

1. “Hello Havana” in Barbados featuring art inspired by the 11th Cuban Biennale
2. “LAND | SCAPE” in Trinidad in celebration of the country’s 50th Anniversary of Independence.

Barbados: 23 March – 5 April will be virtually linked to Diaspora Vibe Gallery’s Cultural Exchange in Jamaica. It will also feature a series of creative and professional development workshops delivered by Brighton Photo Fringe for local Barbadian artists.

Roots & Wings contributors are selected from invited artists and from an international open call for submissions.

Confirmed exhibitors are:

Akley Olton
Alyson Holder
Amrita Chandradas
Angela Newman
Gary Stewart
Genevieve Browne
Gerard H Gaskin
James Cooper
Jean-Guy Cauver
Kaydia Lewin-Turner
Leslie Robertson Toney
Leslie Taylor
Mariamma Kambon
Matthew Thomas
Michael Mapp
Norman Mayers
O’Neil Lawrence
Paul Jackson
Raquel Vasquez La Roche
Regina Kimbrell
Rodell Warner
Dr Shawn Sobers
Wayne James

Urbanflo Creative Consultancy in collaboration with Brighton Photo Fringe, Crawley Borough Council and the Barbados Commission for Pan African Affairs are pleased to announce “Roots & Wings”, an international photography exhibition to launch the Olympic-inspired Programme which aims to connect artists and communities across traditional, cultural, social and geographical divides.

“Roots & Wings” celebrates the forthcoming presence of the Barbados, Grenada, Bahamas and Dominica Olympic training camps in Crawley, and features a range of talented artists representing the UK and the Caribbean.

The exhibition tours to Barbados as part of Brighton Photo Fringe Caribbean 23 March – 5 April.

Roots & Wings Partner Events
Virtual Links to Caribbean Exhibitions

LAND | SCAPE 7 – 24 February 2012

“LAND | SCAPE”, Artistic Visions of Paradise – a Contemporary Artists Exhibition and Artist’s Workshop taking place at the Normandie Hotel Gallery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. The event is presented by Urbanflo partners Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) and curated by Rosie Gordon – Wallace, in celebration of Trinidad & Tobago’s 50th Anniversary of Independence. LAND | SCAPE features well-established voices of the Caribbean aesthetic: Brian Wong Won, Clayton de Fretias, Jeremy Powell, Patricia Roldan, Tom Weinkle and Maxine Spector will work with Trinidadian Master Artist LeRoy Clarke. Self-taught and one of Trinidad’s finest contemporary artists, Clarke was conferred the title Master Artist by The National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago in 1998. In 2003, the Government acclaimed him a National Icon.

HELLO HAVANA – 12 February – 10 March 2012

“Hello Havana” s an exhibition based on the theme of the 11th Havana Biennial. Taking place at the Queens Park Gallery: Pelican, The exhibiting artists are: Sheena Rose, Nick Whittle, Guru, Denyse Menard-Greenidge, Natalie Atkins-Hinds, , Ann Rudder, Gail Pounder-Speede, Bill Grace, Russell Watson and Leslie Taylor. The work is very varied with video, mixed-media, fibre arts and an altar. The Biennial is a prestigious exhibition of contemporary art, which started in 1984 – originally providing a platform for under represented countries on the international art scene. The first editions featured only Latin American and Caribbean Artists; however by 2009 western countries were also invited to participate.

LIVING SCULPTURES II – 29 March – 3 April 2012

“Living Sculpture II” – Diaspora Vibe International Cultural Exchange. Taking place in Jamaica, this is the 15th annual international exchange by Diaspora Vibe Gallery. Artists from St. Maarten, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Aruba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Gambia, Venezuela, Curacao, UK and the U.S. along with art historians, critics, art lawyers, cultural students and curators will convene in Jamaica to explore contemporary Caribbean art practice – aesthetics from the Caribbean and migrant perspective. The exchange involves an intensive programme of artist talks, workshops, critical debate, professional development sessions and studio visits; culminating in an exhibition at the Cag Gallery, Edna Manley College, Jamaica. Artists will talk with artists about hyphenated existence, art production while living in the Diaspora, border communities, professional development opportunities, and document the process in Jamaica side by side Jamaican artists.

Organised by www.urbanflo.com

Photography, protest and politics (deliberate small’p's)

Over the next year I’m going to go back to my roots and make more pictures, both still and moving, as well as writing words (which I may do less).  As a political (small ‘p’) animal at heart, it is work that has something to say, or maybe more importantly work that asks questions, that inspires me most in terms of my own creative practice.  (I don’t force this upon my students, although they do at least have to have a focused idea they are pursuing!)

Below I have embedded an interesting and inspiring talk by David Hoffman about the role of the documentary photographers and the images they produce in moments of civil protest and uprisings.  He paints a strong rationale of the photographer’s need to document the times we live in, even when faced with possible personal injury and the threat of loss of liberty.  Hoffman gave the talk as part of a seminar titled ‘Who’s Afraid of Photographers?’ at the House of Commons in 2010.  For me he illustrates clearly the sentiments of rapper KRS One in 1989, when he directed his lyrics to the police in ‘Who protect us from you’ [(c)1989. Original copyright remains]

“You were put here to protect us
But who protects us from you?
Every time you say “That’s illegal”
Doesn’t mean that that’s true
Your authority’s never questioned
No-one questions you
If I hit you, I’ll be killed
But you hit me? I can sue.”

Who’s Afraid of Photographers? by David Hoffman

See source at – http://vimeo.com/17058761

In photography the documentary tradition is just one way that protest and political ideas can be represented.  It is an approach of trying to mirror events as they happen, albeit a selected and mediated mirroring on the part of the photographer.  The genre of political photography that gets much less attention is work that is overtly constructed.  Like a painter working into a canvas, these photographers use actors, models, ‘everyday’ people and themselves as their subjects.  They carefully choose the locations, lighting and whole set design to construct an image that contains some sense of an idea, which the viewer can (hopefully) translate into an implied meaning when bringing their wider knowledge of the context into play.  I personally feel the most powerful work in any genre raises awkward questions for the viewer, rather than attempting to offer coherent answers.

Photographic illustrations such as the work of Jiri David who created portraits of world leaders who had their hands dirty with violent conflict – inserting his own tears into their eyes.  We never get to see these men in this way.  Only if they write their memoirs do we get told about their moments of vulnerability, long after the events which caused them. 

The work of Mitra Tabrizian whose photographs often depicts awkward alienation, being an outsider, and the artifice of everyday behaviour.  In the two examples shown below, in the first she depicts a scene that in one way looks like a typical 1970s television police drama with the black guy as the bad guy, but in this hyper-real deliberately artificial wooden representation, the certainties of who is doing what and why are blurred.  Frozen in this stagnated way, the police themselves take on their own menace.   Her second image below is titled City, London, 2008.  City Bankers, all men, suspended in animation.  In the midst of the global recession, the artifice and coldness of the construction speaks for itself.

The third photographer I’ve included below is Cindy Sherman and her self-portrait work exploring the subject of ‘centrefold’ adult models, (personal as political).  Sherman wanted to represent the moment just after the centrefold photographs were taken, when the model is no longer performing for the camera, faced with their own stark realities, personal conscience and vulnerability.  These images below use events and ideas ‘mirrored’ by Hoffman and other photojournalists as starting points, from which they then create photographic illustrations, representing visual ideas and questions interpreted from real world moments and common media representations.

Over the next year it is these types of work, documentary and constructed, that I want to pursue in not only my analysis, but also in my practice.    In answer to ‘Who’s Afraid of Photographers?’, perhaps the answer should be ‘everybody’.   Photographers asking awkward questions, though not passing  judgment on the answers.

Disconnected colonial landscapes in a pre-photographic era

Before the invention of photography and film, we got to know the world beyond our personal experience through the oral, drawn, painted and written descriptions of the explorers that went forth, and came back.  The communication between what was experienced via the explorer’s senses, and what was subsequently represented to the people, did not always match up.

See below the (bad quality) photograph I took at a British stately home, of a 17th Century colonial ink etching.

It looks as if the etching was produced informed by an oral or drawn description.  Modern viewers of this 17th Century image understand the intention of what was represented, though are able to see how the memory of a palm tree and perspectives in the landscape does not quite relate to the actual.    It shows the slight disconnection between the representation and the real; the sign and the signified – creating a visual poetry rather than textual essay.  The broken link between the lived experience and the reproduction has rendered inaccuracies, inconsistencies, myths, assumptions, and an imagined ideal.  A (literally) captured land presented as an imaginary captured landscape.  The viewer thinks they know what type of land this is and approximately where it might  be, but if they went looking for it themselves they will never find it.  Not exactly.

The advent of photography added a seemingly comforting layer of visual truth, which satisfied the viewer as it spoke directly to the senses.  Arguably it comforted our most trusted sense; our eyes. 

http://www.oceania-ethnographica.com/archiveB001.htm
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Photography brought with it a perceived visual truth which made etchings (and other such crafts representation approaches) largely redundant as a source of news and events.    Photography brought a different type of myth into the world; an assumed instant (visual) knowledge that had to be proven false rather than proven true – thus images were accepted as true as a default, largely remaining unquestioned.  

Photography created myths that were easily accepted as ready packaged nuggets of truth.  Images presented alongside a single caption – a statement of ‘fact’ that tried to summarize and represent an entire anthropological monograph.

Image + caption = TRUTH

“The experts say it is so, so of course it is true.  Why question it?”

What photography gained in visual recognition it lost in textual nuance.  It gained scientific respectability but lost the creative poetry (of an etching) - lost only because viewers were not looking for it or even expected it.  When faced with a bold fact, there is little motivation to look for anything else, least of all visual poetry.  One has become instantly satisfied.  Comforted with a perceived stable knowledge.  The viewer thinks they know what is meant by ‘ancestor worship’ and approximately what it might entail, but if they went looking for it themselves they will never find it exactly.  Not what they imagined. 

Life is more complex and layered than a single photograph and a supporting caption.  The viewer of an etching knows that it is a mere representation of a real phenomena, thus trusts the gap between what is assumed, and what further needs to be known (by education and experience).  The viewer of early photography (and arguably even now) collapses the disconnection between representation and reality.  We can see it with our own eyes, the caption providing the common sense clue.  The photograph + caption acts as an extension of our memory – we were never there yet still we have seen it with our own eyes.  

We trust it in a way we would never trust an etching.  The irony is that the etching is more truthful, as it pretends to be nothing other than a mere representation.  The photograph presented as fact denies its true nature – that of a captured scene – a voiceless glimpse, full of poetry.