‘Actually Existing Sculpture’

The project ‘Actually Existing Sculpture’ is a user-generated collection of photographs shared on Flickr. Thus situated within an environment of amateur photography, they allow the vernacular in sculpture and photography to be examined together.

The sculptures that people buy for themselves often convey an array of sentiments long banished from contemporary art: they strive to be heroic or cute, to mark the exuberance of youth or the companionship of maturity, to be funny or affable, to be an object of veneration or of bathos. For many viewers, these sculptures may fail in their apparent task but for the millions who buy and house them, despite their off-the-peg character, they speak of ideals and emotions that exceed the commercial. When sculpture is placed in the public realm, or in the quasi-public, privatised space of the shopping centre or corporate lobby, its failures become readily visible as it is treated with indifference or hostility. Pedestals may be used as tables and sculptures as climbing frames. With older works, both traditional and modernist, the heroic images and ideals of the past seem to mock our banal and degraded present, and the response is often to scrawl on them or even throw them to the ground. For others, sculpture is simply the site of work, another object to be lifted, packed and unpacked, moved from one place to another or displayed for potential buyers. You gain a different relation to an art object when you have to lift it.

This photographic project is one way of exploring the utopian urges inherent in ‘actually existing sculpture’, and the way those punctuate an environment that is otherwise starkly corporate or is the consequence of the unplanned agglomeration of various functions and neglects: the trafficked and rubbish-strewn street, for example. This sculpture tells its viewers things that the quasi-sculptural objects of the art world conceal: it clearly declares its status as a commodity, it bears the marks of its public reception, and it inhabits the impoverished environment to which it is such an inadequate response.

Julian Stallabrass is a writer, curator, photographer and lecturer. He is Professor in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is the author of Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press 2004, Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London 2003; Paris Pictured, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002; High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London 1999 and Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996; he is the co-editor of Ground Control: Technology and Utopia, Black Dog Publishing, London 1997, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1998, and Locus Solus: Technology, Identity and Site in Contemporary Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1999. He has written art criticism regularly for publications including Tate, Art Monthly and the New Statesman. He is an editorial board member of Art History, New Left Review and Third Text. He curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, ‘Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images’.

‘Domesticating the Digital: Some Observations about Family Snaps & Digital Cameras’

This paper is based on a series of interviews with mums of young children about their family photography. The interviews took place between 2000 and 2008, and thus spanned the arrival of digital cameras in one sort of vernacular photographic practice. That first decade of the twenty-first century also saw the widespread appearance of family snaps in public spaces in the UK, particularly in the context of the death of the subjects of those photographs.

This paper explores those two phenomena, and argues against their conflation. That is, against the grain of some commentaries, it argues that digitalisation cannot explain the breaching of what once seemed to be a clear distinction between the private space of the family snap, and the public space inhabited by other sorts of photography (art, documentary, journalism, advertising). The argument proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the digitalisation of family photography is proceeding very unevenly in all sorts of ways, and that the fact that most family snaps now at some point materialise as a digital file has no necessary consequences for how they are used or for their effects. Secondly, I argue that the emergence of family snaps into public spaces has a quite different context: namely, the changing constitution of the contemporary public.

Finally, I speculate on emergence and consequences of what might be a new kind a vernacular photograph, the photograph-as-message, which does have a more intimate relation to digital technologies, in the ease with which it can be sent and deleted.

In making these arguments, I also suggest that understanding photographic practices could benefit by paying attention to the ethnographies undertaken by anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies. Both their conceptual stance and their methodologies offer rich insights for exploring the complex fields of contemporary photographic practices.

Gillian Rose is Professor of Cultural Geography at The Open University, and her current research interests lie within the field of contemporary visual culture, and visual research methodologies. One long-term project has been examining family photos as visual objects that circulate between a range of different practices in the global visual economy, and Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment was published by Ashgate in 2010. Another even longer project has been the book Visual Methodologies; a third edition will be published by Sage in 2011. And another recent project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council has looked at the experiencing of designed urban spaces (www.urban-experience.net). Other publications can be found via her website.

‘Visual Economies of Scale: Making sense of Majority Photography’

As a term with increasingly respectable currency but without firm ontological status, ‘vernacular photography’ can encompass utilitarian visual material resulting from an almost infinite variety of purposes, from advertising and science to the records of various disciplinary and commercial institutions. As such, its name is legion, and the breadth of the category may create more problems than it solves. Photographic historian Geoffrey Batchen, for example, categorises as vernacular every photograph that cannot be comfortably incorporated into an art historical narrative. This, by his own admission, thus includes “the vast majority of photographs ever made”.

Despite its possible reach, however, ‘vernacular photography’ seems most commonly associated with its most prevalent manifestation: popular, amateur practice. Photographs that emerge from this location have been derided as ‘banal’, ‘redundant’ and even ‘indefensible’ by some commentators, who have dismissed them in the most vehement terms as sentimental and uncreative. Simultaneously, however, vernacular photography in this sense is also singled out for celebration, and may be eulogised as uninhibited, unselfconscious and authentic, particularly within arts practice, where it has long provided a potent form of alternative inspiration.

If we might understand such practices as ‘majority photography’ (using, as a model, the corrective category of the ‘Majority World’), then any overarching judgement that seeks to praise or condemn such a vast body of material inevitably risks meaninglessness through generalisation. How then to proceed with analysis of such unwieldy categories? Any investigation must remain attentive to particularities in order to keep empirically grounded, yet must also do justice to the scale of practice rather than extrapolating from small samples. In response to this challenge, this paper will examine a unique and previously unanalysed collection of 55,000 amateur photographs taken on a single day, 25 years ago. Revisiting their origins, looking closely at their shared characteristics – both within and beyond the frame of the image – and considering their archival ‘afterlife’, this paper will explore the uses and limitations of the category of ‘vernacular’ as a means of understanding mass-participation photography, both historically and in the present day.

Dr. Annebella Pollen is currently Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, and has previously held research appointments at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. Her research interests broadly centre on the visual and material culture of ‘the ordinary’. Previous research has included the photography of serious amateurs in the interwar years, found and family photography over a range of periods, and Edwardian popular postcard imagery and inscription. Pollen’s recently completed PhD thesis (from University of the Arts, London) examined the uses and expectations made of amateur photographs across a range of discursive locations, and developed new methodologies for their analysis and interpretation.

‘Performance & the Vernacular’

My discussion will refer to Eugene Meatyard’s work ‘The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater’, and will focus on two of my recent projects, Seven Years and Front, and a sound piece entitled ‘There’s You’ which, while having no images included, relates to vernacular photography in terms of how much its meaning relies on oral description and repetition. The monologue was based on my mother’s description of what she could see and remember of old holiday snaps from the annual family holiday.

Through these works, I will argue that the family album presents an idealised version of family life, which often belies the truth. Viewing albums requires a ritualised oral dialogue of description, story telling, memory making, nostalgia and celebration, as well as denial, absences and secrecy.  A high level of familiarity is needed for decoding the subject matter of family photograph albums. When we are photographed in the context of family snapshot photography, we fabricate ourselves according to certain expectations, and are fabricated by them. We all have a ‘photo-face’, we pause and we pose for a snap; we usually smile. But despite ourselves, the subconscious often leaks out into the body, bypassing the face, which is firmly behind its mask. The instantaneity of photography isolates out these small gestures that often go unnoticed in real life, because they are too minute and too commonplace to be discerned.

Trish Morrissey works with photography, film and video. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Impressions Gallery Bradford, Pumphouse Gallery London, Yossi Milo Gallery New York, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, USA, the National Media Museum, Bradford, and the Wilson Centre for Photography, London.  Her work has been featured in several anthologies, including Vitamin Ph , Survey of International Contemporary Photography, Phaidon Press, 2006 and The Photograph as Contemporary Art, by Charlotte Cotton, Thames and Hudson 2005.

‘To live is to be photographed’ (Sontag): Photography & Ambient Intelligence’

This paper aims to do two things: firstly, to explore the relation between photography and the conception of life as ordinary, everyday, technologically mediated and individualised; and secondly, to show how this conception of life is being produced within an industry vision of ubiquitous computing that incorporates digital photography.

In her article on the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Susan Sontag argued that the events in question, the torture and abuse, were ‘designed to be photographed’. She then extrapolated from those specific events to the ordinary events of our daily lives. Finally, she extrapolated from the events in our lives to life itself. I will ponder the ramifications of Sontag’s argument and ask: if ‘to live is to be photographed’, then what is photography?

If photography is increasingly entangled with life itself, I will show how life itself (or a particular conception of it) is being produced by a branding and development of ubiquitous computing known as Ambient Intelligence. Ambient Intelligence both opens out the possibilities of the individualised self or subject, and simultaneously closes them down, enrolling photography within a cycle of self-reinforcement which is paradoxically a re-ordering that reinforces life as we know it, even as this changes. Photography then, is an agent – perhaps a key agent – of this paradox.

Sarah Kember is Reader in New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technology and Subjectivity (Manchester University Press, 1998) and Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 2003). She is currently writing a book entitled Life After New Media for MIT Press and her first novel The Optical Effects of Lightning will be published this summer. She co-edits the journal photographies.

‘‘Minutes after this photo was taken’: the Temporality of the Family Photograph in the Newspaper’.

It is the context of the family photograph in the newspaper that makes its reading strange as the image shifts from the private to the public. Developments in technology have changed the way family photographs are translated within the news with the shift from analogue to digital. This has resulted in the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private in the press.

Drawing on my personal archive of collected examples of family photographs in newspapers this paper will focus on the temporal qualities of the family photograph in the context of the newspaper. It will discuss the way the press utilise the notion of time and how this influences the way photographs are subsequently read. This is evidenced by the newspaper captions and headlines that often have a temporal dimension, such as ‘The last family photograph’ dramatically making clear the finality of these images. In a sense these family photographs take on a new and important responsibility of being the last visual record. These ‘last’ pictures are also different in experienced temporality; they are the last photograph for the family, but the first photograph for the reader i.e. ‘the first picture of the last picture.’

On-line social networking sites like Facebook have allowed the newspapers greater access to family photographs resulting in the use of more candid types of imagery. Developments in technology have also brought about a shift in the viewers expectations of immediacy. Family photographs are taken so close to the time of the reported incident that this ‘proximity’ of the photograph to the event becomes a signifier of meaning in and of itself. Whether the image is a good family photograph or not is outweighed by the temporal nearness of the incident. The immediacy of the image is conveyed by the headline; ‘minutes after this photo was taken’. Perhaps it can be argued that this prioritisation of time evidences the emphasis placed on the photograph as object/commodity in its presentness at the expense of the meaning within the photographic image itself.

Dr Sophie Beard is a visual practitioner, theorist and educator. She is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Culture at the University for the Creative Arts at Epsom and also teaches at Chelsea College of Art Design and Kingston University. Beard completed her BA (Hons) Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1998 and her MA (RCA) Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art in 2002. In 2010 Beard completed her UAL funded practice based PhD titled; ‘Collecting Collects: The Family Photograph in the British Newspaper’ which was based in the School of Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. Beard’s research lies within the field of Visual Communication. She is interested in Vernacular Photography and its Practices, Material Culture, Traces and the Unseen and the methodological approach of The Archive and Act of Collecting.

Contemporary Vernacular Photographies

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9.30 – 10.00 Registration*

10.00 – 10.15 Introduction – Sas Mays

10.15 – 11.30 Panel 1:

Julian Stallabrass: ‘Actually Existing Sculpture’

Annebella Pollen: ‘Visual Economies of Scale: Making sense of Majority Photography’

11.30 – 12.00 Coffee

12.00 – 1.15 Panel 2:

Sophie Beard: ‘‘Minutes after this photo was taken’: The temporality of the Family Photograph in the Newspaper’

Sarah Kember: ‘To live is to be photographed’ (Sontag): Photography & Ambient Intelligence’

1.15 – 2.30 Lunch*

2.30 – 3.45 Panel 3:

Trish Morrisey: ‘Performance & the Vernacular’

Gillian Rose: ‘Domesticating the Digital: Some Observations about Family Snaps & Digital Cameras’

3.45 – 4.15 Coffee

4.15 – 4.45 Panel 4:

All Speakers Roundtable Questions and Discussion

4.45 – 5.00 Closing Remarks

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Tickets are free for University of Westminster staff and students of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies – numbers are limited so please book a place from Sas Mays. Other interested parties should book tickets through The Photographers’ Gallery.

* Coffee is not provided for registration, and lunch is not provided, but there are numerous cafés in the vicinity.