||||Emma Campbell Photography

Another night at Hellzapoppin’ another crew of fabulous outfits, Sugahfix have put a web gallery of some of them I photographed up here

Tonight I shall be attending the graduating class shows at the University of Ulster in York Street, Belfast.

The MFA Photography class have their own website here
I already know to expect some great work from them.
The third year BA students will also be showing work such as Alberto’s;

I can’t wait to see it all up on the walls and hopefully there will be a few book dummies to look at as well.
Of course it will make me even more nervous for this time next year…

My first Blurb

“We are invited to dance between photographic truths and photographic pleasures with very little awareness of the floorboards and muscles that make this seemingly effortless movement possible.” Allan Sekula

This is  a talk I gave about two or three weeks ago, I will add the slides asap!

The Traffic in Photographs

Introduction:

Allan Sekula approaches photography from a critical perspective as well as from that of a practitioner. This text extract is from a longer passage written in 1981and Presented as part of The Vancouver Conference Papers.   It comes after Sekula had already been studying photography for over ten years and during the beginning of the Reagan/Thatcher years, when some, like Sekula, already saw the taint of danger in the dreams of free-market economic ideologies.

He was forever turned towards photography when he learned of the post editing of the FSA archives, to tone down the ‘socialist’ edge of the work.  To Sekula this smacked of McCarthyism and encouraged him to push against such State led objectives.  This essay was presented near the beginning of his career, after the height of modern feminism and the civil rights movement, after the language of photojournalism and fashion photography had been cemented.

Sekula’s Argument

1. By using the word ‘Traffic’ he presents us with the idea that photography is both informed by our viewing of the world and also informs our viewing of the world. 

2. He starts the essay by asking:

3. How can we work towards an active, critical understanding of the prevailing conventions of representation, particularly those surrounding photography?

4. He frames the dichotomy of the medium, how it is bathed in the history of all preceding art and yet simultaneously, because of it’s birth through scientific and commercial means, also saturated with the history of industrial ‘positivism’. Show slide 2, the prisoner and the ‘art’.

QUOTE slide 3 and show slides reijlander 4

5. Using capitalism and colonialism as the over-arching world influences throughout this part of his essay, he positions photography within this commercial and powerful framework, showing it to be in need of an ‘anti-institutionalised” view.

6. SLIDE 5

7. Here he claims that photographic discourse exerts a force that is simultaneously material and symbolic, inextricably linking language and power.  So, though we are talking specifically about photography and it’s power of representation, we shouldn’t forget that it gives concrete form to – thus lending both truth and pleasure to – other discursively borne ideologies: of “the family,” of “sexuality,” of ‘consumption,” of “production,” of “government,” of “technology’” of “nature,” of “communications,” of “history,” and so on.

8. SLIDE 12 He believes that the art aspect of the medium is often apologizing for the suppositions of the evidence based practice.

9. On one hand we can elevate science or enshrine the workings of the state, whilst on the other hand we can have constructions which elevate the artist.  His view is that this co-existence or paradox can even be evident in one piece of work and claims that photography more than any other medium actually gives society a chance to bring these normally disparate standpoints together – the scientific and the metaphysical.

10. Wary of this linkage of abstracts with visual ‘proof’ Sekula warns: “Thus photography was hitched to the locomotive of positivism.”  In a later part of the essay he brings this to conclude with comparing the role of photography in eugenics with August Sander’s more egalitarian but equally positivist ‘survey’ of a nation.

11. The triumph of the artist in photography is equated to a triumph of the idea of a ‘purely mental’ artistic control of a machine for creative ends, especially important during times of the devaluing of individual crafts.

12. The mirroring within this paradox then continues when he recognises that SLIDE 13 “…every proper portrait by a “man of genius” has its counterpart in a mug shot.  Both attempts are motivated by an uneasy belief in the category of the individual.” SLIDE 14

13. This is underlined by the mentioning of what he terms ‘social control ‘photography;  anthropology, criminology, motion study – as a way of validating photography by its scientific value SLIDE 15

14. Citing the work of early 20th Century photographers, as ‘free-floating metaphorical play’ he pitches this as a reaction to the existing industrial and vernacular realistic approaches of the medium, and yet, he warns that both modernist approaches were limited by accepted rules and structure. SLIDE 16

15. Here he asks another question: Can traditional photographic representation, whether symbolist or realist in its dominant formal rhetoric, transcend the pervasive logic of the commodity form, the exchange abstraction that haunts the culture of capitalism?

16. SLIDE 18 Allan Sekula posits that Without trying to address these problems, the resulting images will be superficial and commercial at best, and aiding and abetting a system of ‘publicity and stardom’ at worst.

17. “The goals of a critical theory of photography ought, ultimately, to involve the practical, to help point the way to a radical, reinvented cultural practice.”

Conclusion

Discussing photography as a means of communication and as a means of building visual language.  SHOW SLIDE 19

pointing out the problems with the negotiation of a ‘truth’ based art and an ‘art’ based ‘truth’.

I took this photo of my sister at Christmas 2004. I want to make some more pictures about our relationship, but I haven’t decided what approach to take yet.

It was great to be able to get into the hospital and see my best mate Claire so soon after she’d given birth. Gaia was still all wrinkled up from only being about a day old and poor Claire was knackered!!
I’m off tomorrow to see if I can get a few more images, trying out my dusty old Mamiya again…

Having had my kit stolen for the third time,  I’m starting to wonder whether I should have a tracking device fitted to my cameras…I understand that some people are less well off than others, but really, to get the money to replace all of the kit even with insurance, is going to take a long time.
Luckily we have been asked not to shoot too much new work for our Masters just yet, so hopefully I’ll have something decent by then and I do still have my Film cameras!

I posted these on flickr recently.  It was a bit like repeating myself from a photo from years ago.  Here’s the old one…

And here is the more recent one:

and

I want to try more different approaches, situations and ways of shooting, but without just ending up at an extended portrait of my sister.

Space at Hellzapoppin’ this month and the lovely Lucy Morgan and Andrea McVeigh were spinning some great tunes again.  There were plenty of great outfits as usual and The Pavilion had us all in the top bar this evening.  I’m already looking forward to Hellza’ Halloween!

If you want to see all of the pictures from the night go here

So, thinking ahead to my first week of my Photography Masters at University of Ulster, I keep having big ideas and little ideas and medium/regular/bog standard ideas floating in around the old brain. What do I do with these ideas? Well in the first instance I dismiss many of them as old, done before, not interesting enough and so on, and the few that I have left I either set free by talking abut it with someone or I keep to myself, until such times as I feel it necessary or worthy of divulging.

I have only written two of these down and only two remain steadfast in my brain and begin to diverge and metamorphose into various other ideas and strands and tangents. Really, this is quite unsatisfactory! But in a life surrounded and dictated via so much paper information, are notes to self really what I need? Searching through one of many notebooks in the vain remembrance of something golden, only to discover how banal it seems once re-read in black and white? Something else is required, something altogether more organic and yet steadfast.

Now however, this become ideas about ideas and I get lost in my own internal jungle gym so maybe it’s all about testing, just doing it, trial by trying it out, rather than circumspection.

So I finally finished doing that poster for my husband’s film “One Million Years JCB”.   It really helped that the costume was made so well by Anna McCaughtry and Erin got the pose just right (despite it being more uncomfortable to do than it looks!), so I’m quite happy with the results, though if I had more time I might age it a bit to make it look a bit more B-Movie:

I’ve never really done such a close pastiche before, it was really good fun, I was all worried about the lighting and getting the pose just right, it really came together at the end though.  One of the originals for inspiration is here:

and another:

I feel like I need to make a poster with Conor too as he looked great as well, but then again Raquel Welch was the iconic image so really she was the focus for the titles!