Progress Update 30 August 2016

Some progress on my major project has been made since the last update in June, despite a variety of interruptions for holidays, etc. I have looked through the 27 image ‘sketches’ that I submitted for Assignment 2. Five have been rejected and 21 have been revised, whilst one awaits a major revision. Revising the sketches has ranged from making one or two minor alterations to a complete overhaul of the sketch and has been based on tutor comments, as well as my own feelings about the subject matter and how it relates to the accompanying text. I have produced three new sketches and have plans to produce five more before I submit for Assignment 4 at the end of September. For consistency I have produced all the revised sketches in colour and each consists of a blend of two or more images, one or more being contemporary and one or more archival (from the time when my mother was alive).

Following feedback from my tutor and our discussion relating to the second and third assignments I have decided to concentrate on producing a photo book as the major output from my project work, although I still intend to produce prints, as well as a multimedia or video presentation, for assessment. My thoughts about what style and format to use for the book varies from week to week, but my current plans are as follows:

• ·    The book will probably contain 40-50 images, including (doubtless following further revisions and replacements) the 30 or so that I will have produced as sketches by the end of September.
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• ·         All the images will accompany a page of text, although there will be more images than pages of text.
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• ·         I will split the book up into four or five ‘chapters’.
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• ·    I am considering dealing with the subject of clinical depression as a separate chapter, and producing a set of images to accompany the text. This is problematical, as I have never knowingly suffered from clinical depression, but I would like to give this a try. I already have ideas for a number of image sketches, which would likely be a blend of two or more contemporary images.
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• ·       I intend to format the book with text on the left hand page, followed by an odd number (1, 3, 5…) of images, each occupying a separate page. I am going to have to re-order some passages of text and images in order to place them in the relevant chapter and will also write some new text to accompany the new images. I will do this before submission for Assignment 4 and will produce a ‘mock-up’ book, with text accompanying images, for the assignment. This book will be incomplete, with more text and images to be added later. If the format doesn’t look right it should be easy to change, say to a ‘single chapter’ book, with text accompanying each image, or to a totally different format. The book is sure to evolve as the project reaches its final stages and my tutor has even suggested that I could split it into more than one book, although I think that I will need many more images than planned for this to be a sensible option.

Project-related research continues apace and I have studied in some detail the work of Cindy Sherman, Jim Mortram and Adrian Clarke since the last update in June (see this blog for further details). Adrian Clarke’s book ‘Gary’s Friends’ was particularly relevant, both in terms of linking images with text to produce an emotional response and in terms of formatting a photo book with accompanying text. I’m looking at the work of Sophie Calle at present and have lots of other artists (many suggested by my tutor!) still to investigate.

Major Project Influences (8) - Adrian Clarke and Book Review: 'Gary's Friends' (West Pier Press, 2007)

My tutor recommended that I look at ‘Gary’s Friends’, both because of the relevance of the subject matter and because as a photo book it might give me some ideas about how to construct a book about my relationship with my mother.

Adrian Clarke gave up his career as a lawyer, specialising in cases of miscarriage of justice, in order to become a professional photographer. However, he retained his interest in human interaction, swapping clients for sitters. ‘Gary’s Friends’ is a collection of portraits of people affected by violence, alcoholism and drug addiction in former mining villages in County Durham and in Middlesborough. Each of the 40 portraits is accompanied by an account from the sitter of how they had lived their lives. In addition, Clarke includes some ‘gritty’ urban and rural landscape photographs of the area in which the sitters lived.

The book, which was published nearly ten years ago, has met with critical acclaim from a number of sources, both as a photo book and as a social statement.

Review

Children of broken marriages, violent and/or alcoholic parents, juvenile delinquency, early exposure to drugs, gangs, alcoholism, prostitution, violence and heroin addiction are themes in a bleak picture of shattered lives, surrounded by an industrial wasteland following the closure of local mines. Clarke paints a bleak picture of his subjects, all of whom are connected, in some cases tenuously, to Gary Crooks, ex-drug addict, drug dealer, gangster and armed robber. Each portrait is placed opposite autobiographical text, succinctly paraphrased by the photographer.

When I first opened the book I started reading the text before looking at the portraits, but I soon switched to first observing the portraits and then trying to second guess the story of the subjects before reading the text. It seems that other readers of this book may have used a similar technique – in his introduction, Alexander Masters memorably suggests that Kay (Image 1) “might be a holiday operator testing a hotel bed in Tenerife, but is actually an alcoholic sitting in her rehab room”. It soon became clear that there were few winners in these stories, although many talk about making new beginnings.

Image 1; Kay Moore (Adrian Clarke)

Amidst all the personal carnage there are stories of minor heroism, in particular from the mothers, such as Christine Crooks (Gary’s aunt), who never abandoned her son Philip (see Image 2) despite his continuing heroin addiction.

Image 2; Christine and Philip Crooks (Adrian Clarke)

Image 2 is a great example of how Clarke brings out the character of his subjects very well in the family images, where the subjects can and do interact. When the sitters are alone it becomes harder to predict how their lives have turned out. Nearly all the portraits were taken indoors, either in the sitters’ homes or in institutions, using natural light. Sometimes they are cropped tight but on other occasions their surroundings (usually in a sitting room) give the viewer the chance to get a feel for their immediate environment. It was only when I looked through the portrait photographs again, ignoring the text, that I realised how much of the sitters’ characters were revealed in the photographs.

The landscape photographs further add to the bleak picture created by the text. Cemeteries, dead end streets, motorways and urban and rural decay all feature, with the image of a man walking his dog past a derelict garage (Image 3) being typical.

Image 3 (Adrian Clarke)

Those of us who read this book are likely to be in far better shape than the subjects that he describes. This should not allow us to be critical of them. What would have happened to me if I had been born in one of these villages, perhaps to a single mother who could only make her living out on the streets? Perhaps I might have been born a heroin addict (an example is described in the book). Only the strong and/or lucky can make good having been brought up in an environment such as this and how strong you are as a person is dictated, to some extent, by your genes – it’s a vicious circle, in which the easy solution appears to be to turn to crime and/or to take to drink or the needle. Clarke delineates a major social problem that is not limited to the communities that he so eloquently describes, but he does not offer a solution.

Photo Book Organisation

Following some introductory images and the written introduction by Alexander Masters, Adrian Clarke’s book sticks to a rigid format. Text is placed on the left hand page and portrait images are opposite the text on the right hand page. If, as it often does, the text goes onto a second page, it is accompanied by a non-portrait image opposite. I am planning to also place passages of text on the left hand page, but to follow each passage of text by an odd number (1,3,5) of images, to be placed starting on the right hand page but then alternating between right and left until the final image is placed on the right hand page. A new piece of text will then be placed on the next (left hand) page unless a new chapter is to be started (my current intention is to split my photo book into four or five sections, although this may change in the future). Clarke’s is the first photo book that I have found where there is a substantial amount of accompanying text and where the formatting has some similarity to the way I would like to format my own photo book.

Final Comments and Learning Points

Adrian Clarke’s text and images speak eloquently of a broken or crumbling community at a certain time, where lives had been and were being ruined by social deprivation, shortages of jobs, boredom and social decay. As such, this work carries a powerful punch. Will it change (or has it changed) society? This is doubtful, because it is likely only to be read by the ‘converted’. We are also, of course, looking at an unrepresentative cross-section of the community. Surely not everybody in the area was taking drugs, was an alcoholic or a prostitute. Some people would have tried to break out of this apparently dead end existence and doubtless some will have succeeded. New housing estates (mentioned in the book) will have brought comparatively well off commuters into the area: new supermarkets to serve them and industrial estates to replace the rubble will have brought jobs. The community will be changing, hopefully for the better.

The use of a combination of text and images here produces powerful and at times emotional messages. This is exactly what I am trying to do in my own project, so Adrian Clarke’s book represents an excellent lead for me to follow. Likewise, the construction of the photo book provides a useful template for me to investigate.

Major Project Influences (7): Jim Mortram.

Jim Mortram is a carer for his mother, who suffers from chronic epilepsy. His upbringing and his role as a carer based, as he says, “on the fringes of society”, has required patience, empathy and understanding. He has used these qualities within his community in East Anglia to gain the trust of and to establish relationships with a number of people who might be regarded as social outcasts and to document their lives, both through the medium of photography and through the use of the written word. Unlike so many people he is obviously a great listener and allows his subjects, who would otherwise be unable to speak for themselves, to tell their ongoing life stories in their own words. The results take the form of detailed picture stories which are published on his web site (http://smalltowninertia.co.uk/).

My tutor alerted me to Mortram’s work because he rightly thought that it was very relevant to my own project work and to my relationship with my mother. There is a stark contrast between Mortram’s acute social awareness, patience and understanding of his subjects and my own lack of understanding as a former long distance, (very) part time carer. However, his description of his subjects and their alienation from society does remind me of the struggle that my mother faced in her later years, although I concede and hope that she was offered and received far more help from family and social services than Mortram’s subjects get – although they do not have to cope with clinical depression. Mum was never allowed to slip off the edge of society, whereas many others do: these are the people whose lives Mortram chronicles.

How relevant to my work is Mortram’s photography? Technically, his output is variable although he probably had to contend with some difficult lighting conditions for the many indoor shots. Some of his best work is very atmospheric (see image 1 below), but what is most impressive is the way that his photographic portraits evoke emotion and empathy as they bring his characters to life. It is far too late for me to portray my mother in her final years, but if I had chosen to do so when she was alive I would have learnt much from Mortram’s work.

What really stands out in ‘Small Town Inertia’ is the combination of the images, Mortram’s own succinct commentary on the status of his subjects and the somewhat lengthier, but fascinating utterances of the subjects. I was particularly moved and impressed by his account of the life of a gentleman called David.

David

Image 1: David (Jim Mortram)

David was blinded in adult life as the result of a freak accident. He lived with his mother, Eugene, whose health was deteriorating when Mortram got to know David. Eugene passed away and David was left to cope for himself, without friends or family. Mortram was at the hospital with David when he said goodbye to his mother for the last time (Image 1) and documented David’s life in the months that followed her death (Images 2 and 3). The account, often given in David’s own words, brought tears to my eyes. Unfortunately there are many other Davids living all over the country, to whom life has given a very poor deal, who are totally forgotten and don’t have a chance to communicate with society. Jim Mortram’s work reminds us of this and pricks at our consciences: could we do more as individuals or as part of society to avoid letting the Davids of this world ‘slip through the net’?

Image 2: David says goodbye to his mother for the last time (Jim Mortram)

Image 3: David (Jim Mortram)

Here is David speaking in a profound manner about the unjustness of the way he is sometimes treated:

“When I was a boy, I had some chickens and sometimes you’ll get some and they’ll start pecking at one bird, and it seems like once one gets a bit of blood, a feather or two gone from a hen and they get to the blood of the bird, they all jump in, pecking at it, attacking this one hen and the only way to stop them was by putting some tar on the hens feathers and then when this gang of birds would attack, then they would get this tar in their beaks and not be able to spit it out, and they don’t like the taste, so they stop.”

“That blood lust, that mentality, seems to me to be the way people can be. I think of that a lot, especially when I get trouble in town, we are like chickens in a run and when one has a go the rest join in, jumping on the same one. It’s exactly the same thing, isn’t it, except instead of birds doing it to one, it’s people doing it. We really are no different. We are no better, are we?”

“The thing is, you can stop the birds doing it, but people, I don’t know if there is a way to stop people behaving in this way. You’d think the deterrent would be guilt and shame, for acting in such a fashion, but no, people don’t seem to have those feelings any more, they just do as they want, well, some people have feelings of guilt but, they are never the ones that have a go or become a bully.”

“That’s how I honestly feel about it. When the poor blame the poor, it’s the gang of chickens, singling out the weak ones, and trying to peck them to death, when they should all be against the farmer, for it’s he that’ll be cutting their heads off.”

Final Thoughts

Jim Mortram is rightly critical of the lack of government funding and support for people on the edge of society, such as Tilney1, another of his subjects who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. These picture stories are powerful and moving accounts of lives lived on the fringes of or outside society, which are now receiving a wide audience through Mortram’s efforts (although it should be much wider than it is). Some of the work has been published in book form (by Café Royal Books) although I have, as yet, been unable to get my hands on any of them. Nevertheless the web site gives an excellent, detailed account of his current work, which will be a valuable source of ideas for my own work.