As part of one of my upcoming exhibition of We English photographs at the National Media Museum (12th March – 8th September), and as discussed previously on the blog, we will be including photographs from the Museum’s own collection, introducing the English at leisure from a historical perspective.
Since September last year I’ve been working closely with Ruth Kitchin, Collections Assistant, on the selection and curation of works for the exhibition. Also involved was Stephen Daniels (Professor of Cultural Geography at Nottingham Trent University and author of the essay ‘The English Outdoors’ from We English) who was invited to the Museum to discuss the development of the selection. Here is a short film, shot in the Museum archives on 24th November last year, when we all came together to discuss some of the considerations for the selection.
Since 2005 Stephen Daniels has been Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s programme in Landscape and Environment. He has published widely on the history and theory of landscape imagery and design. His books include The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1988) co-edited with Denis Cosgrove, Paul Sandy: Picturing Britain (Royal Academy of Arts, London July 2009) and the influential book Fields of Vision (Polity Press, Jan 1994).
Writing in the latter, Daniels describes landscape imagery “as not merely a reflection of, or distraction from, more pressing social, economic, or political issues; it is often a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagement. As exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony, particular landscapes achieve the status of national icons, and imperialists, almost by definition, have annexed the homelands of others in their identity myths, projecting on ‘foreigners’ pictorial codes that express both an affinity with the colonizing country and an estrangement from it.” In the book Daniels shows how various artists–including painters, landscape designers, and architects–have articulated national identities in England and the United States from the later eighteenth century to the present day.
You can download Daniel’s essay ‘The English Outdoors’ from We English, here.
As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s 75 years since Bradford-born JB Priestley wrote his classic English Journey, a snapshot of his travels around the country chronicling the thoughts of ordinary people. What did it mean to be English?
In last Sunday’s Observer, journalist Sarfraz Manzoor writes about his visit to Bradford – a city transformed by mass immigration, but cited in a recent survey for its essential ‘Englishness’ – and ask what that means today. Here’s a short extract from ‘Bradford reflects on many shades of Englishness’:
“My time in Bradford is drawing to an end. What I have found is a more complicated picture than I had expected. The city did feel divided and I can see why some whites could feel that much of Bradford more closely resembles Pakistan than England and are turning to extremist parties. And yet digging deeper I also found signs of hope in places like Saltaire Cricket Club. Things were rarely quite what they appeared. Ed, the chairman of the cricket club, was white but adamant he was not English since he had spent the first seven years of his life in Scotland. Meanwhile his friend Anil had been born in India but said that he felt utterly English. And then there was Husman Khan. He was the one who had been in the throng burning copies of The Satanic Verses, but not long after the book-burning Khan met a girl -a white girl from Halifax, whom he married and with whom he has four children. I met his 16-year-old daughter, Najda, her head covered in a headscarf that she had bought, she told me, “in a hippie clothing shop”. She belongs to a generation whose identity is as much about the music on their digital devices as the heritage of their parents. What does Englishness mean to you, I ask. “It’s about being prim and proper,” suggests Najda. “You either laugh or cry and the English laugh at it all.” ”
I’d be interested to know what the survey is that he mentions in the article related to Bradford and Englishness. He makes no other reference to it and a quick search on the web reveals no leads?
“What one man saw, heard, thought and felt on a journey through England” J B Priestly, quoted in English Journey
I was pleased to hear from another British photographer, John Angerson, who is heading out on the road documenting England. Angerson is following in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley who wrote English Journey, a celebrated account of his travels through rural and industrial England in the 1930s. 2009 marks the 75th anniversary of its publication.
Angerson says his project will “highlight– as Priestley did – industry, migration, shifting communities, and citizenship, questions that were as relevant in the 1930s as they are now. Priestley’s English Journey is an example of an individual’s perception of place, and how a place is determined by the particular viewpoint from which it is observed. This is relevant to what we know about the nature of photography. Photographs are subjective- documentary photography can only ever be about the photographer’s perceptions of places, and people they encounter.”
Just before Christmas I attended a talk by Ingrid Pollard at Tate Britain as part of their Conversation Pieces series. It got me thing about my previous post talking about landscapes as contested places and I thought it would be interesting to touch upon the visual relationship between rural England, notions of Englishness and ethnicity.
Pollard first came to public attention in 1987 with Pastoral Interlude, a series of photographs about Black people’s experience of the English countryside, particularly the Lake District. Steeped in the heritage of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, her photographs explore the beauty of the English landscape and coastline, alongside the memories hidden within England’s history and its relationship to Africa and the Caribbean. Her interest in the layers of history is echoed in her use of 19th century photographic techniques.
As a Black woman, Pollard articulates in her Pastoral Interlude and Wordsworth Heritage series several levels of alienation and otherness. The landscape of the Lake District, which she sees as epitomizing the ‘authentic’ British countryside, confirms the status of the Black woman as an outsider. For instance, in Pastoral Interlude, Pollard captions a photograph of herself in the landscape,
“…it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I though I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread….”
The caption indicates what she takes to be the oppressive homogeneity of visitors to the region. Writing about Pastoral Interlude in her book Postcards Home (Chris Boot Ltd, 2004) Pollard says “There was an unconscious selection of the lone figure within the landscape. It became a way of working. The stylized posed figures, the use of historical details about a particular place. Nothing about the scene is really ‘natural’. It’s as manufactured and deliberate as the assumptions and stereotypes about Black people.”
Pollard’s use of surprising, sometimes shocking captions subvert her images which otherwise show someone, who at first glance, looks like they seem to be enjoying themselves in the countryside and appear to be ‘at home’. For instance, another image of herself in the Lake District she captions
“…Searching for sea shells, waves lap my Wellington boots, carrying lost souls of brothers & sisters released over the ship side…”
As John Taylor writes in his book A Dream of England, “despite the commodification of the countryside as a haunt for well-equipped ramblers, following in the footsteps of the Romantics, for Pollard the landscape is disenchanting: the spell it casts as a commodity seeks to discount her as a customer. Her landscapes recall with irony the tradition of eighteenth century British landscape painting, which sought to establish the countryside as the natural domain of the British middle classes.”
Twenty years after her Pastoral Interlude work was made, I wonder whether Pollard would still find the English countryside as insular and racist as she did then?
Another photographer, whose work has challenged our stereotypes and conventional readings of English rural landscapes would be John Kippin. Kippin’s work pays allegiance to the conventions and traditions of pictorial landscape whilst foregrounding issues within contemporary culture and politics. Note particularly his photograph ‘Prayer Meeting, Windemere’ taken from a body of work called Nostalgia for the Future.
Describing the scene in Creative Camera (quoted from A Dream of England), Paul Wombell writes that the party are “probably from Lancashire and came to work in the mills, and now they are tourists in this heritage England. It turns the idea of British landscape upside down; who goes there, what meanings can people get” (1992). As Taylor notes “although there is a spiritual tradition to English landscape, prayers in this fashion are quite unconnected to the pantheism or Romanticism which is usually associated with it.”
This projection of a dominant culture in the countryside can be seen when we look at the preponderance of white, middle-class, middle-aged members of the National Trust (see this article in The Independent).
It was also recently highlighted in a study by the Commission for Racial Equality (2004), which showed that although ethnic minorities make up 8% of the UK population they represented just 1% of visitors to the countryside. The then chairman of the Commission, Trevor Phillips, suggested that a form of “passive apartheid” existed in the British countryside. His comments certainly sparked quite a debate. However, it was interesting to see how many ethnic minorities disagreed with his analysis (see replies posted on the BBC News Online here) and actually felt quite at home in the countryside.
This summer there was an article in The Guardian where four journalists described their memories of holidays in the UK. British born writer Maya Jaggi described her experiences of childhood holidays in the Lake District in the 1970s.
Maya Jaggi, Lake District
“The ingredients of the ideal holiday were fixed for me as a child on a trip to Windermere. After a day on the lake, messing about in a rowing boat with my family, my aunt Madhur gave me a masterclass in boning fish.” She goes on to say “My parents had taken to borrowing a friend’s cottage in the village of Ulpha near Coniston Water. My mother (Madhur’s eldest sister) was head of English in a London school, and was drawn to the Lake poet associations. She would marshal my two older brothers and me to Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, pointing out the spot where the Ullswater daffodils sprouted. My brothers learned to fish for brown trout in the River Duddon, the inspiration for 34 Wordsworth sonnets (I was keener then on Swallows and Amazons). The riverbanks near Ulpha bridge are now a popular site for picnickers, but we had them much to ourselves.”
Jaggi makes no reference to her or her family feeling marginalised in the landscape. They seem very much at home. In fact, she goes on to make a connection between the landscape of the Lake District and that of her father’s birthplace of the Punjab-
“For my displaced, cash-strapped parents the Lake District may have been a landscape in which to recreate for us aspects of their own childhoods. My father, whose family lost land in Punjab during Partition, would roll up his trousers and wade gamely into the becks, much to my adolescent embarrassment, while packed lunches on the fells could conceivably stand in for the lavish picnics at Himalayan hill stations that were a mythic part of my mother’s Old Delhi family. After the sisters studied at Delhi University (where my parents met), my mother left for London on her honeymoon, while Madhur, after Rada, settled in Greenwich Village. The English Lakes became a place where a family dispersed across three continents could reassemble.”
In relation to my own journey around England for this project, while I found that much of rural areas in the West Country and Northumbria to be very white, in the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, North Yorkshire Moors and Lake District I was surprised to witness relatively large numbers of ethnic minorities engaging with the countryside (as Wombell alluded to, this would make sense given the proximity of these rural retreats to large towns and cities with substantial ethnic minority populations, like Burnley, Bradford, Leeds and Blackburn), and seemingly not alienated by the environment.
Take for example my photograph below of rock climbers on Stanage Edge in the Peak District. In the foreground a Muslim couple wearing distinct grey robes walk on a footpath through the landscape. Our tendency to ‘read’ this view in terms of traditional English activities is hard to resist and the couple therefore seem to be ‘out of place’. On speaking to them I learned that they were from Leicester on a weeks walking holiday, staying at a B&B in the nearby village of Hathersage. They spoke of feeling completely at ease in the area and described how they often spent their holidays exploring the English countryside.
One organization that is trying to engage more ethnic minority groups with rural England is the Mosaic Partnership. Mosaic is an organization forging links between black and minority ethnic community groups across England and Wales with four National Park Authorities (the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, Brecon Beacons & North York Moors), the Youth Hostels Association (YHA), and the Campaign for National Parks (CNP; formerly the Council for National Parks). They are attempting to promote National Parks as part of our shared cultural heritage, as well as places offering opportunities for physical recreation and spiritual renewal.
You can read accounts written by several ethnic groups who have taken tours in National Parks on Mosaic’s website here.
It’s worth mentioning that there is also a political dimension to landscapes of rural England. Take for example the reporting and politicised nature of the foot-and-mouth outbreak or the trail of Mohammed Hamid, who was jailed in February 2008 for organising al-Qaida style training camps across Britain (read article in The Guardian here). In relation to ethnicity, this latter event is of interest.
Photographs taken by two surveillance officers from Scotland Yard (above) showed Hamid, and several other Muslim men in a group of 23 others, on exercises at a farm in the Elterwater area of the Lake District. In the trial Hamid claimed these were bonding sessions to bring together Muslim men who felt vulnerable after 9/11. But police said he was trying to recruit and train young men for violent jihad. Hamid organised two more camps in the Lakes. The last on 17 August 2004 included 21/7 ringleader Muktar Ibrahim. MI5 officers covertly filmed this gathering. Hamid later organized excercises in secluded sites in the New Forest and paintballing centres in south-east England.
The widespread reporting and publication of these photographs provoked headlines around the world linking rural England with terrorism-
“Training camps for terrorists in UK parks”The Guardian, 14th August 2006
“Holiday trip, or a ‘bomber’ training camp?”Daily Telegraph, 19th January 2007
“Al Qaeda terrorist who took part in Lake District training camp sentenced to six years in prison”Daily Mail, 22nd November 2007
“Network of terrorist camps in rural England – Convictions of 7 militants revealed terror activities in idyllic rural settings” MSNBC, 26th February 2008
“Trial exposes network of UK terror camps”Zee News, 27th February 2008
I’m currently reading an interesting book by Michael Billing called Banal Nationalism (Sage Publications, 1995). The thesis of banal nationalism suggests that nationhood is near the surface of contemporary life and makes a claim that nationalism is all too easily bracketed off as something extreme and irrational. Banal nationalism refers to the everyday representations of the nation which build an imagined sense of national solidarity and belonging amongst humans.
Billig suggests that nationalism is more than just a set of ideas expressed of separatists. Instead, nationalism is omnipresent – often unexpressed, but always ready to be mobilized in the wake of catalytic events. He writes: “A nation is more than an imagined community of people, for a place – -a homeland – also has to be imagined….The imagining of a ‘country’ involves the imagining of a bounded totality beyond immediate experience of place. The imaginery of the national place is similar to the imagining of the national community. As Benedict Anderson stressed, the community has to be imagined because it is conceived to stretch beyond immediate experience; it embraces far more people than those with which citizens are personally acquainted. The citizens of the nation state might themselves have only visited a small part of the national territory. They can even be tourists in parts of ‘their’ own land; yet it is still ‘their land’. The unity of the national territory has to be imagined rather than directly apprehended.”
He cites examples of banal nationalism as the use of flags in everyday contexts, sporting events, national songs, symbols on money, popular expressions and turns of phrase, patriotic clubs, the use of implied togetherness in the national press, for example, the use of terms such as the prime minister, ur team, and divisions into “domestic” and “international” news, and even the weather. Many of these symbols are most effective because of their constant repetition, and almost subliminal nature.
Billig argues that the academic and journalistic focus on extreme nationalists, separatist movements, and xenophobes in the 1980s and 90s obscured the modern strength of nationalism, by implying that it was a fringe ideology. He notes the almost unspoken assumption of the utmost importance of the nation in political discourse of the time, for example in the calls to protect Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, or the Falkland Islands in 1982. He argues that the “hidden” nature of modern nationalism makes it a very powerful ideology, partially because it remains largely unexamined and unchallenged, yet remains the basis for powerful political movements, and most political violence in the world today. However, in earlier times calls to the “nation” were not as important, when religion, loyalty, or family might have been invoked more successfully to mobilize action.
To find out more about various academic studies on the topic of nationalism, visit the The Nationalism Project website here.
I’m currently reading a book called Landscape and Power, edited by By W. J. Thomas Mitchell. The book, originally published in 1994, reshapes the direction of landscape studies by considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identity.
As Mitchell writes in his introduction- “Landscapes need to be decoded, they don’t merely signify or symbolise power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power. Landscape is a dynamic medium, in which we live and move and have our being, but also a medium that is itself in motion from one place of time to another…Landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity.”
In reference to my last post on Dutch painting, there’s a fascinating essay by Ann Jensen Adams called ‘Competing Communities in the Great Bog of Europe: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting’. You can read it on google books here.
As Adams identifies, historically the Dutch have maintained a unique and tangible relationship with their land. According to a popular Dutch saying- God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland, referring to the largest land reclamation project attempted in the history of the world, which took place in the 16th Century.
Quite belatedly, I’m reading Susan Sontag’s book On Photography (Penguin Books, 1971).
Just read this paragraph, which seems somewhat relevant to my last post….
“One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture….The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been – what people needed protection from. Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”
“The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those perceptions govern deeply the whole process of perception.”
Walter Lippman (1987) quoted in The Hollywood Arab
Still no baby yet so I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to a post I received earlier in the summer from a photographer in Italy who challenged my approach to We English. Notably, my decision to invite the general public to post their own ideas which I could then photograph. Here is their post-
Dear Mr Roberts
As a viewer the idea is really functional. As artist the idea it is a bit vicious. Are you playing smart asking people to help?! Finding by yourself events and situations is the main reason to be a photographer. You will be a translator of others ideas and inputs. Are you a politician of a self-thought photographer? And you receive funding as well! Yes definitively you are a bit of a politician.
Giuseppe Mascia, May 3rd 2008
My reply is loosely based on two interviews I did with Joerg Colberg on his blog Conscientious and Jim Casper on Lens Culture in July 2007 where I discussed my approach to Motherland (published: Chris Boot). A number of points I raised are important in helping to answer Giuseppe’s question, and will be fleshed out slightly here.
There were two main reasons for choosing to travel to Russia for my book project, Motherland. Firstly it was somewhere that had always fascinated me. I studied Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and a number of the courses I took looked at social, cultural and economic issues surrounding Russia and the former Soviet Union. Secondly, while there had been a number of important photo documentaries on Russia in the last decade, many were produced around the time of the fall of Communism, and tended to concentrate on themes surrounding disintegration and decay. I felt that the dialogue was very one sided and that the debate had moved on in recent years but photographic representations hadn’t.
ENCOUNTERING ‘THE OTHER’
Samples of imagery and text used to advertise British overland tourist trips to East Africa.
The problematic notion of representation and the question of how photographs are important to the construction of senses of place very much informed my approach to Motherland. The context for my approach was based on my BA Hons undergraduate dissertation. Published in 1995, my dissertation, entitled Encountering the Other: Representations and Readings of East Africa, was undertaken while traveling on an overland truck from Kenya to Zimbabwe with a group of Western tourists. Using Edward Said’s concepts of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘imagined landscapes’ my paper looked at Western representations of Africa, in particular those associated with the tourist literature advertising overland expeditions.
Ideas of imagined geographies and representation provide the starting point for Said’s discourse of Orientalism where he attempts to map the production and reproduction of myths and imagined geographies in constructing the inferiority of other people and places. Orientalism maps relationships between Occident and Orient. The Orient, Said argues, is contructed as an object for the Western gaze, a representation of ‘the Other’. Said suggests that although all cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures, the preponderance of power has been on the side of the self-contituted Western societies.
Tourist literature referencing the English explorers like Livingstone, Stanley and Speke.
The premise of my paper was that as Western tourists our imagery of Africa is one grounded in a colonial history; the 19th century European tradition of the expedition with adventurers such as Livingstone, Park and Thompson going out to explore and encounter distant and exotic lands. These images have been nurtured and re-enforced by the media and tap into a reservoir of ideas we have regarding colonialism, imperialism and representations of far away, exotic places and peoples. These ideas have also been appropriated by modern tourist companies in advertising ‘real’ African experiences; we, the tourist, are branded as adventurous travellers going out to experience the dark heart of Africa.
A page reproduced from my dissertation. The photograph is captioned: “Our quest for authenticity- Photographing the Masai tribe provided us with a ‘cultural experience.’”
My research concluded that even once East Africa had been encountered, it was very difficult to overcome the representations of place, engrained stereotypes if you like, that the individuals had brought with them. Evidence of which was presented in the photo albums that people produced at the end of the trip. These albums were representative of the way people remembered and ‘experienced’ East Africa, but the problem remains that many merely reproduced exotic images rather than presenting reconsidered and augmented perceptions of East Africa.
MOTHERLAND
Turning to Russia, I had my own preconceptions of this place. As a child, the Soviet Union seemed vast and mysterious. It took up most of the wall map in my geography classroom and was the vital region to capture to win the board game ‘Risk’. There were the glamorous KGB agents up against James Bond, and the Soviet-bashing propaganda of Cold War films like Red Dawn and Rocky IV. I marvelled at the photographs of Yeltsin aloft a tank outside the White House in Moscow on the collapse of the Soviet Union, ushering in a new but uncertain era.
I’d only been to Russia once before, passing through in 1994 to visit my wife, Sarah, who was studying there. We decided that now would be a fascinating time to return, fifteen years after the fall of Communism. After researching the project for 18 months, we left London in July 2004 and spent the next 12 months travelling over 75,000km from the federation’s Far East, through Siberia to the Northern Caucasus, the Altai Mountains and along the Volga River. We finished in Moscow in July 2005.
Cover of Motherland, published by Chris Boot Ltd, March 2007
The resulting book is meant as a visual statement about the nature of contemporary Russia. It is my attempt to try and move beyond ‘imaginative geographies’ where the fantasies and preconceptions of the photographer are prevalent in the images to a representation of Russia that does not deny the problematic veracity of pictorial representation. Motherland responded to these questions successfully, in my own judgement, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the fact that I spent a continuous year in Russia allowed for a sustained and in depth engagement with the landscapes and people that I came across. While I travelled extensively and did not, as it were, conduct visual ‘fieldwork’ in a single location, the duration of my engagement enabled a spontaneity – I could respond to diverse events and situations, and was neither constrained nor driven by the specific agenda or timeframe of a photojournalistic assignment or news agenda. My preconceptions and expectations about place, for example, were altered the more time I spent there. If, inevitably, a visitor or traveller can only acquire a partial understanding, one that remains ultimately more that of an outsider than an insider, the grasp acquired by a questioning and persistent onlooker will nevertheless be richer and deeper than that of a more transient visitor.
I was constantly conscious about shedding my preconceptions and instead to be led by what I saw and experienced. If I had gone to Russia with the intention of documenting poverty, I would have looked for it – and found it. Instead I wanted to be as open as possible to new ideas and be surprised and challenged by what I found.
Map of Russia showing where we were each of the 52 weeks of the year.
It was very important that not all of the trip was planned. While I had a framework for the journey, I deliberately left at least half of the itinerary to spontaneity, thereby increasing the chance for my own stereotypes to be challenged and opening up new avenues of exploration that I could otherwise have overlooked. By staying in peoples’ houses, rather than just hotels, I was able to find people and places that I would never have otherwise come across. In some ways enabling me to become an insider rather than just a tourist.
One of the greatest challenges was being able to submerge yourself in some of the larger cities, notably in Siberia, when you often only had a few days. How do you really get a sense of a particular place in a short period of time? You turn up, you book into a hotel, and then how do you integrate yourself into the local society? It’s very difficult. One way I overcame this was by using homestays (sourced from the Hospitality Club website) where I sourced local families to stay with. Instead of just being overwhelmed by a place on arrival, I was immediately experiencing it from a local viewpoint. People introduced me to their friends and took me to places that I would never have found from a guidebook, or from our own research.
In Omsk we stayed with a University professor who gave me a tour of his University and took me to the All Russia Ballroom Dance Contest, which his daughter was competing in (which led to the portrait of Nikita and Rufina); in Rostov-on-Don I stayed with a local journalist who gave me a tour of the Cossack military base (which led to a portrait of a Cossack soldier on horseback); in Yekaterinburg I stayed with Sergei who took me for a banya with his son Kostya (which led to the image of them bathing naked in the lake); while in Kamchatka I spent five days trekking through the wilderness on horseback with Paval and Sasha.
To participate in the everyday rites of Russian life and society, to be an involved guest and a friend, as well as an observer and witness, turned out to be tremendously enlightening. On the other hand, the sheer magnitude of the country and the unusually large distances I covered allowed for a greater sense of conceptual and aesthetic comparison, of visual diversity and the cultivation of knowledge and photographic memory. Distance and time, therefore, ensured a naturally more rounded representation of people and place and a recognition of the complexity of my subject.
It was always my intention to combine both landscapes and portraits in the book. I used landscape photographs to provide panoramic overviews of the country, images that help to provide a sense of context, evoking peoples in their diverse habitats and surroundings. I was interested in making detailed pictures that the viewer could read, like a map, and find different cultural and social references in. Where possible, I tried not to crop out any significant details from the landscape I photographed.
These landscapes I countered with portraits that are fixed in a narrow moment of time and space and which take you in to the landscapes and provide a much more intimate experience. Most of my subjects were stopped and photographed in the environments where I came across them. I attempted to select as large a cross-section of people as possible, from all walks of life. The portraits were taken before engaging in conversation with the individual so I could remain as detached as possible and their expression appear deadpan. What becomes of greater importance are the details in the image; the clothes they are wearing and the landscapes they inhabit. The portraits are almost an anthropological study. As formal and static in nature as they are – I still think there is often an intimate connection between myself and the subject.
In producing a balanced portrayal it was important not to gloss over the cracks of modern day Russia. The Chechen Republic is still a profoundly emotive issue in Russian society and it would have been wrong to ignore or ‘sensor’ pictures from this region.. At the same time, I have included two very differing images in the book from Chechnya. While one shows the main outdoor market in Grozny in front of heavily shelled apartment blocks (in some ways a more typical image we’re used to seeing), the second shows a group of well-dressed Chechen women and their children in a part of Grozny that has been reconstructed. The latter is a surprising image in terms of our visual references, which have been dominated by negative photographic imagery. It was important that I showed both sides of the story.
Of course my view is still only a representation of Russia, “a construction that is contingent, partial and unfinished.” Duncan & Ley, 1993 (Place, Culture, Representation pub Routledge) and one which reflects my own set of ideas and biography. However, the book will now stand alongside many other bodies of work about Russia and, hopefully, form part of a wider photographic debate about contemporary Russia.
More recently I decided to create a website for the book and have a guest book page where people can leave comments about the work in a public forum. Here I am most interested in receiving feedback from a wider audience, particularly Russians themselves, where people can discuss how they perceive my representations of Russia.
Screengrab of the guest book page on Motherlandbook.com
WE ENGLISH
Turning to my England project, I won’t discuss much about the background to the work, which you can read on the blog here, instead look at why I decided to request ideas from the general public.
I had plenty of ideas about what I wanted to photograph for this project. Two boxes full in fact. At one point I employed a researcher to help me sift through the piles of cuttings, tourist brochures, books and leaflets I’d amassed. However, this is the point, these were my ideas. My representations of England. What I was interested in also discovering, were other people’s ideas about England; gaining a sense of their perceptions of this place, rather than just photographing my own.
Box of cuttings gathered during research for We English.
In all I received about 250 ideas from the general public. Ideas which, in themselves, provide an interesting snapshot of England in 2008. They illustrate what’s important to people and explore their own ideas on the notion of Englishness. They also enabled me to get a broader spectrum of coverage across themes and geographical locations and helped to find subject matter, especially on the local level, that could otherwise elude me. Rather than just photograph yet another Cheese Rolling Festival, a now cliched tradition, I wanted to find out what else happens in England that may not be part of the national conciousness.
In the end, I only probably used about 10% of the ideas provided. However, I’m considering printing them as an appendix to book, unedited, to sit alongside my own photographic representation of England.
“Sitting comfortably, I open my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life.” So begins Keiller’s video take of a “peripatetic study of the problem of England” conducted by the deadpan Robinson and his long-suffering mate. A mysterious advertising agency has tasked Robinson with investigating the ‘problem of England’. He and the narrator embark on a series of seven journeys across England, inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based on Defoe’s travels as a spy in the 1720s. Paul Scofield narrates a series of illuminating snippets of information as the itinerant camera focuses on one provincial backwater after another.
Guardian writer Robert Clark describes the film as “like being lucky enough to get stuck on a train next to somebody’s utterly erudite and slightly potty grandfather. If you sometimes get fed up with the state of England, watch this. It won’t change a thing, other than cheering you up no end.”
Another film I watched recently was Gallivant (1996) by filmmaker Andrew Kötting. Gallivant is a 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, which is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys’s stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert’s syndrome: she’s not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.
This road trip film is part homage to the unsung eccentrics who make up our national identity, and part tribute to the bonds of family. It’s a tender film, definitely worth watching.
I’ve just come across this article by Blake Morrison on The Guardian website where he reflects on what our photographic heritage reveals about our changing national character .
Think of England
Blake Morrison, May 19th 2007
“A photograph seeks to capture the present, but by its nature can only contain the past. However alive or ‘gritty’ or imbued with a sense of instantaneity, the photo can’t help but be nostalgic, since its subject (whether a face or a landscape) is frozen in the moment the shutter clicked – a remembrance of things past. When Philip Larkin, writing lines on his girlfriend’s photo album, said that photography is “as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing”, this was the paradox he tried to pin down – that on the one hand photos seem immediate and “empirically true”, but on the other they commemorate “just the past”:
Those flowers, that gate, These misty parks and motors, lacerate Simply by being over; you Contract my heart by looking out of date.
The Tate’s new exhibition of 150 years of photography in Britain is entitled How We Are. It’s a good and perfectly justifiable title, since the 500 images that are included, ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll through Bill Brandt and Cecil Beaton to Chris Killip and Jane Bown, provide us with a composite portrait of ourselves as a nation. But the show is also the story of “how we were”, since even the most recent exhibits are a commemoration of lost time, and reveal not just what is constant in the British landscape and character, but how much is changing or has already changed. For the curators, Val Williams and Susan Bright, the defining characteristic of British photography is its obsession with the past, and the dominant images “taken in the frustrating place of the present, are infused, explicitly or implicitly, with a sense of melancholy”.
The convention is to think of photography as the most up-to-the-minute of art forms – not just because its practitioners are impelled (or commissioned) to record the latest fashion, the freshest innovation, the newest face on the block; but because (unlike novelists or film-makers) they lack the freedom to set their work in the past. But history no longer happens without a camera being present. And photographers have always been more preoccupied with history than their reputation would suggest. Among the earliest photos in the Tate show, from the 1860s, is one of Stonehenge taken by Colonel Sir Henry James: a moody tribute to ancestral pagan origins. And from the 1880s comes a shot of two women and a man frolicking in the hay in their Sunday best: a pastiche of bucolic bliss. Neither fulfils the expectation that most of us have about late 19th-century photography, in which industrial might or urban poverty dominates the picture: Brunel posing in top hat and cigar against a backdrop of massive iron chains; the waifs and urchins rescued by Thomas Barnardo, as photographed by Thomas Barnes. But as becomes clear from the Tate show, the Victorians were drawn to rural idylls and costume portraits – with photographers like Francis Bedford and Benjamin Brecknell Turner quick to supply their needs by producing images of reassuringly timeless landscapes.
For early exponents eager to establish photography as a respectable pursuit, the temptation was to imitate classical scenes and poses. It was as if the newness of photography could only pass muster if it succeeded in looking old, and the best way to do this was to aspire to the condition of painting. (The Tate show even includes a bizarre example, circa 1870, by Kate Gough, of the two media being mixed: on to the necks of three painted ducks swimming on a pond, three photographs of women’s heads have been superimposed.)
But honouring the past was more than a PR exercise on behalf of an upstart art form. Many photographers then and since have been motivated by the need to preserve something they believe or fear is disappearing. In the late 1960s, for example, the short-lived Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) set out to record what he called the “daily anachronisms” of British life, such as beauty contests, carnivals, galas, dog shows and strongman contests. As the country became “more Americanised”, “reduced to an island or defrocked”, he wanted to pay tribute, as Orwell had before him, to the British (or, more specifically, English) people, with “their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life”. Forty years on, the national psyche seems to have changed (whatever happened to our gentleness and moral rectitude?) The territory Ray-Jones explored has since been reoccupied by others, including Martin Parr, whose photo of morris dancers performing outside a high-street McDonald’s commemorates the perilous survival of ancient British customs in the global marketplace.
There’s a similar spirit in the work of Homer Sykes, who in the 1970s compiled a set of photos of “traditional British customs”, morris dancing included, and published them in a book called Once a Year. It’s an extraordinary document, not least because most of these customs – though venerated over centuries and still carried out on particular days of the year – are so weird. Without Sykes, we might not know what’s involved in burning the clavie, wassailing the apple tree, dicing for maid’s money, dunting the freeholder, firing the fenny poppers or bottle kicking and hare pie scrambling – nor have heard of the haxey hood game, the wicken love feast, the Painswick clyping ceremony, the Hungerford hocktide or the Hinton punky night. It’s true that you can get by very well without knowing a thing about them and still feel British. But Sykes’s attention to the wackiness and paganism of these activities is not the usual pointless heritage industry fare. What interests him is the contemporaneity of the participants, the coexistence of ancient and modern.
Take his The Burry Man, for example, which celebrates a tradition still carried out annually in South Queensferry in the Firth of Forth: on the second Friday in August, in order to bring luck to the local herring industry by acting as a scapegoat, a man dresses up in a costume of freshly collected burrs and walks through the town, calling in at every pub to collect money and be given tots of whisky. What makes Sykes’s photo more than quaintly folkloric is the contrast between the eyeless, flower-festooned beastie, or “green man”, and his quotidian surroundings: the battered bar with Youngers beer mats; the sharp-faced helpers, in jackets and ties; the drab pub backdrop, with a dispensing machine. It’s the same with other images from this same series: we see ancient rituals being performed or observed by people in ribbed tank tops, thin floral dresses, miniskirts, flared trousers and Zapata moustaches. The effect is incongruous to the point of surrealism, yet it makes you see how rites that have seemingly outlived their usefulness can serve to bring a community together.
A distorted attachment to indigenous tradition can also drive communities apart, which is perhaps what led Sykes to embark on another project in the 1970s, when he took photographs of National Front members during their meetings. More dramatically, he was one of the photographers present when NF marchers clashed with anti-racist protesters in Lewisham in 1977, and the police used riot shields for the first time. As Sykes shows, an alertness to history can work in different ways.
Sykes comes from Vancouver. Ray-Jones, though born in Somerset, learned his art in the US. A striking aspect of the Tate show is how many iconic images of Britain and the British have been produced by outsiders: it’s as if we can’t see ourselves without their help. Among the artists featured are Otto Pfenninger, Bill Brandt and Albrecht Tübke (all German), Leonard Freed and Nancy Hellebrand (both from the US), Wolfgang Suschitzky (born in Vienna), Dorothy Bohm (Konigsberg), Horace Ove (Trinidad) and Vanley Burke (Jamaica). Others in the show – from Madam Yevonde in the 1930s (who grew up in Streatham but was educated in Belgium) to newcomers like Douglas Abuelo, Grace Lau and Penny Klepuszewska – have a perspective that helps them notice things which insiders might miss.
What they and the rest notice, invariably, is how eccentric the British are – or, rather, how much stranger and more interesting than we fancy ourselves to be. How fond of posing with exotic animals; how keen on dressing up and body painting; how obsessed with stardom (long before the age of celebrity); how drawn to clowns, mirrors, circuses, illusions, hats and masks; how shrill and gaudy in our choice of colours. There are more familiar images too, showing our attachment to gardens, villages and beaches. But, for the most part, this is the antithesis of the Picture Post view. The Britain that appears is dandier, showier, more European, more multi-ethnic. More arty, too: there’s a notable strain of surrealism, and in the context of the show even Wolfgang Suschitzky’s photograph of a bowler- hatted businessman outside Foyles in Charing Cross, circa 1936, begins to look like a meticulously orchestrated artwork rather than a piece of opportunistic social realism – the empty pavement, the lines and angles, the falling shadows are all beautifully arranged.
Though careful construction has always been part of the process, it also gives enemies the opportunity to shout “Cheat!” when they find that seemingly “true” photographs are works of artifice that have been set up. The Victorian Arthur J Munby insisted that the working women whose photos he assembled – pit girls, milkmaids, fisherwomen – wear suitably dirty working clothes. Walker Evans did much the same with his Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930s; Thomas Barnes found himself at the centre of a legal row over his “before” and “after” portraits of rescued waifs when the Rev George Reynolds objected, “He is not satisfied with taking them as they really are, but he tears their clothes, so as to make them worse.” There’s no denying Barnes had a propagandist purpose: to highlight poverty and class difference. But a sense of mission can sometimes help rather than hinder the making of art: without it, neither Barnes nor Evans would have created such powerful, aesthetically “pure” images. If we worry that their subjects were coerced and exploited, the Tate show reminds us that many people, not least the British, enjoy posing, crave the attention of the lens and are naturals at dolling themselves up.
Nowadays, people no longer need to go to studios for an image of themselves. The history of photography is, in part, the story of an art form becoming progressively more available to all – from daguerreotypes and the gelatin dry plate, through Leicas, 35mm film, Kodachrome and instamatics, to digital cameras, mobile phones and blogs. Though the Tate exhibition doesn’t go so far as to include phone camera images of 7/7, it does reflect the populism of the art – and its affinity with less privileged sections of society. A comparable show mounted 50 years ago would have offered a very different picture of the British, with greater emphasis on national pride, certitude and homogeneity. This one is postmodern, postcolonial and postmasculinist. Instead of generals and war heroes, we get Percy Hennell’s mutilated soldiers; instead of 1950s housewives in their kitchens, we get suffragettes (a radiant Christabel Pankhurst in 1912); instead of grouse-shooting toffs and flat-capped workers, we get Horace Ove’s Walking Proud, a photo of a black couple in 1971 – the woman tottering on platform heels, the man with his hands in his pockets, both of them wearing hats – the street clearing in their path, as if the world was all before them.
With only 500 images chosen from the millions available, and some wonderful photographers omitted, the Tate take on the British is necessarily partial and selective. But it does raise big questions about where our obsession with the past has brought us. How we are, on this evidence, is confused about who we are. But perhaps that’s not a bad place to be.”
