Feb 27, 2019
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Ghetto
This is a journey through 12 modern ghettos starting in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ending in a forest in Patagonia. In each of these places, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, as editors and photographers of COLORS magazine, methodically documented their inhabitants, and asked them the same questions: How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? To make love? To get your teeth fixed? For many of those photographed it was their first time in front of a camera. Some looked into it with a hard, penetrating gaze. Others obeyed the ritual of photography with smiles. And Mario, on the cover, turned his back on the camera and waited for the shutter to click.
Much like Broomberg and Chanarins series my project is becoming a social research project as well as keeping its open formation by questioning the power of the photograph. But what I have been thinking about a lot is as I come to make more and more portrait work what relationship should I build with the sitter? Many practitioners interview their subjects whether formally or informally and if I was to do so what questions would I ask and how would they feed into the work.
Do you think you live in a real area?
What does rurality mean to you?
What brought you to the area?
These and similar questions were asked in the research papers noted, with answers that I felt were helpful in building the picture of rural life.
Visual relationship between the wall paper and the fatty membrane found between meat and skin. I knew the wallpaper reminded me of something and I found this old image I’d taken of sheep carcass a long time ago which shows the membrane that separates skin and flesh. Its quite sickening to see together... and very surreal
Study of rurality is important, not least to counteract the urban bias of research and political power in Britain today.
What is Rurality, Nicolette Rousseau BA
Stairwell interior, 1950′s social housing unit, Hereford city centre
Racial slang ‘Paki’ inscribed into the wall
What I find interest about this image is the relationship between the colour of the walls and the terminology on the wall. For me the colours found here are very ‘eastern’, it is not a far stretch of the imagination to place it within a scene from India or Pakistan. And so to find the inherently racist term scratch onto the wall creates a dichotomy between the written and the seen which for me are visually intertwined.
Image taken - 10/3/19
Expired Portra 160 NC
Colour variations from negative (green/yellow) scan to positive scan (pink) and variations of post process. An attempt at distorting the construction of our landscape and to make the viewer think differently toward our idea of ‘rurality’.
I want to create a picture of our rural spaces but in the hope that I can shed new light on what life is like there. The rural area in focus has its idyllic scenes and a tourist trail but stepping either side of that track are areas which are fragile in their make up. They exist of farmsteads and middle class bohemians who occupy a space which hasn’t changed since the industrial revolution. It is manicured and cultivated and stands defiant to change. Whether that be an issue I do not know but for me these abstract hedge formations create visual structures which are like knots in the otherwise curated borders.
Image taken 10/3/19
"The premise and nature of each work, and its eventual architecture, develop as the work is progressing, and again I am led in this by my relationship with the particular site”.
After Jems talk at Bower I did not resonate much with his work, I felt it to be romanticised and sentimental but there are elements in this interview which show a correspondence between our mindsets. He talks about the relationship to our histories and our mythologies and for me this is important in regards to making work in the British landscape. But how do you separate myth and fable from the reality of a place and what purpose does the photograph have in achieving it? Does the camera serve as a modernists tool?