Practice
My practice is generated via two major impulses: the first is about making visual statements as expressions of my feelings and experience and owes a lot to the work of people like Jo Spence and Andres Serrano. Indeed I used to dislike such work until I understood such images were visual essays and so now approach much of my work with the following questions in mind: what do I want to say/ or express? This imagery is most often focussed on expressions of my experience as a disabled person as much of my time is spent managing my impairment or dealing with social barriers or challenges arising from society’s reaction to it.
The second impulse is driven by an interest in the graphic qualities within a frame and creating images with form uppermost in mind. Much of the satisfaction comes in the process of creating such images as that process can distract my attention away from the irritants of daily life and allow me to live in the moment. I find these activities therapeutic, and have given me new insights into life and so owe something to phototherapy (J Spence and Jo Solomon (Eds), 1995[1]).
In an ideal world I aim to create images that work for me at both the above levels: form and discourse. Thus they can interpreted at different levels: expressions of things I need to say, while also speaking to those with a knowledge of photographic history and culture through their imagined lives (Fry, 1909[2]), but that can also be enjoyed purely for their primary values of form and mimetic qualities. I hope that images like this below offer these multiple qualities.
Moreover whereas all my previous work has been limited to staying within the photographic medium in technical terms – that is be photographs rather than for example, digital paintings – this course framework allows me to step beyond that if I wish and work in any digital medium where no referent exists, if I choose to.
Research
I also continue to have a great interest in the visual arts and photography in particular and read widely on the subject. The books appear to fall into two types: there are books about the history and nature of art and photography such as Photography and Cinema[3]; Photography and Literature[4]; Art Photography Now[5] and Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture[6]; and there are books about disability and its history like Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum[7] and Buried in the Footnotes: The Representation of Disabled People in Museum and Gallery Collections[8].
Moreover my reading has and is taking me in directions never originally envisaged. For example, it has been interesting to explore the contentious and political nature of photography and photographic history through the work of Straus [9] Edwards[10] and Solomon-Godeau[11] that expanded on themes already explored by Benjamin[12], Coleman[13], Barthes[14], Sontag[15] and others. Indeed sometimes I feel unsure what kind of research and practice I am undertaking: artistic or sociological? However Roger Fry’s work An Essay in Aesthetics[16] has enabled me to see that art is all of these things as it is the chief organ of the imaginative life.
————-
[1] J Spence and Jo Solomon (Eds), What can a woman do with a camera? Scarlett Press 1995
[2] R Fry, An Essay in Aesthetics in Vision and Design 1909 Published by Chatto and Windus, 1928
[3] David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Published by Reaktion books 2008
[4] Francois Brunet, Photography and Literature, Published by Reaktion books 2008
[5] Susan Bright, Art Photography Now Published by Thames & Hudson, 2005 (2006 edn)
[6] A.D. Coleman, Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture , University of New Mexico Press 1998
[7] Sandell, Dodd and Garland-Thomson (eds.) Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, Published by Routledge 2010
[8] Dodd, Sandell, Delin and Gay, Buried in the Footnotes: The Representation of Disabled People in Museum and Gallery Collections, published by University of Leicester 2004
[9] David Levi Straus, Between the Eyes, Published by Aperture 2003 (2005 edn)
[10] Steve Edwards, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, Published by MIT Press, 2012
[11] A Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, Published by University of Minnesota Press, 1991
[12] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (1935) Published by Penguin, 2008
[13] A.D. Coleman, Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture, University of New Mexico Press 1998
[14] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, published by Vintage, 1981 (2000 print edition)
[15] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin 1977 (2008 Edn)
[16] R Fry, An Essay in Aesthetics in Vision and Design 1909 Published by Chatto and Windus, 1928
anomiepete 