Over the summer I was asked by local author Ashley Field to shoot a portrait for publicity purposes.

Exhibition 4th - 26th October 2018 - 55 Albion Street, Leeds, LS1 6JH - Open 11-5 Tuesday - Saturday.

I have work exhibited as part of The Staff Room, an exhibtion of work by staff who work on the HE Courses at Leeds City College.

The overview of the work I produced is covered in the following statement, included in the exhibition space.

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/303459260439552/

Family Snaps
My first experiences of photography as a child were family events; holidays and significant celebrations, for example weddings, birthdays and personal achievements. Of all the photographs we take these family snaps are the most important and often poignant, no matter how fuzzy or out of focus the images are. They offer a glimpse into the past (our past), record how we look, and most importantly they are proof of our existence. These images may beguile memory, but allow us to recall and reminisce about our experiences. Often when we remember people, places or events the intricacies of detail are forgotten and it is photographs that refurnish the information for us. Essentially we are immortalised within the photographic frame. The Human Race has been able to make many incredible inventions, but have not been able to either halt or relive time. This remains in the realms of Science Fiction and according to the works of H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, 1895) and Hollywood films including Back to the Future (1985).

Before the discovery of photography in the 1830s, only the affluent minority of the population could afford to have their images depicted on canvas by an artist. Photography revolutionised the way in which people were able to record their live events, the banal as well as the important. Nowadays more ever than before with the accessible equipment we have at our fingertips (smartphones and tablets) we snap and share life’s events, however insignificant or trivial they maybe.

Photographs are powerful objects and evoke many emotion. They play an import role at times of celebration, grief or remembrance and hold signifiers which can unlock a past time or event. As Gillian Rose states the perform as “a textual archive, or as an ideology …that is, as a social practice”.

Social convention dictates the etiquette of certain occasions as weddings, christenings, birthdays and other significant family celebrations, where there will always be an avid member of the assembled group shooting every part of the event. The apparatus we use may have shrunk considerably in size due to the advancements in technology, but the essence of taking a photograph remains the same. We follow the same convention, directed by the photographer to; stand up straight often in a line and urged to stop fidgeting and look your best, but most important of all to remember to smile.

The formula of the wedding album continues to adhere to conformity. There has been millions of photographs of a million happy couples cutting a million wedding cakes, and yet we perceive our own family snaps as the original. There is a shared conscious of how western weddings are presented and the images (exhibited here) are a slice of life from the mid-twentieth century.

We collect these often formulaic photographs storing them in frames around our homes, in albums or even stored in shoe boxes in the loft and under beds. It is with firm conviction that if these images were lost, stolen or damaged it would have a detrimental effect on our psyche, as part of our lives would be lost forever. These objects are more than pieces of paper, they contain signifiers that open our minds to past events. The accompanying images are of my parents and while the viewer may not know the subjects, there is a shared understanding, we instantly recognise the event shown is unrelated to the viewer but is recognisable and evokes memories of personal family weddings.

Recently, it was my parents Golden Wedding Anniversary and I was asked to scan in the original wedding photographs to use as part of the celebrations. This reminded me of the passage in Roland Barthes book Camera Lucida (p.63) in which he finds a photograph of his mother (after she had passed away) as a young woman. In the text he describes her figure, her attire and the environment. These memories allow him to remember other aspects about her. He remembers her voice, her perfume. An interesting point, he reveals, is that this image he is viewing is before he existed and describes the images as being history to him.

I can relate Barthes experience to the photographs of my parents in the same way. In their wedding photographs, they are in there early twenties, I am now in my forties, and yet they are still, somehow older than me as photographs capture the past. There has been a time of fifty years since the image was shot, yet to me, both my parents appear to look the same today, perhaps a few wrinkles and a smattering of grey hair, but their features remain in tact and I can see the resemblance of their features in my own appearance. These photographs were shot in a time before I existed, but these images define us; without them we do not exist.

Bibliography

Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. (Translated from the French by R. Howard). Reading Berkshire: Cox and Wyman Limited.

Rose, G. (2010) Doing Family Photography. The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment. London: Ashgate.

Gibbons, J. (2009) Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

I have been working with the Leeds Poverty Truth Commission. Last autumn I did a workshop/exhibition with a group of people to show the spread of money in Leeds City Centre (within one square mile). These images were exhibited as part of The Shed Crew production by Red Ladder. 

This film is a series of photographs taken by the subjects within the film and is being shown as part of the closure of the Commissions on Friday, 2nd February, 2018, 12pm-1.30pm at Leeds City Museum, LS2 8BH.

For more information: http://www.leedspovertytruth.org.uk/