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Instagram Examples.

Hi all, here are links to the instagram profiles I showed on Saturday 11th April.

https://www.instagram.com/acornerwith/
https://www.instagram.com/jonrafman/

https://www.instagram.com/jessedarling/

https://www.instagram.com/coronatlas2020/

https://www.instagram.com/amaliaulman/

https://www.instagram.com/digitalartistresidency/

https://www.instagram.com/brownhistory/

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DIGITISING AN ANALOG IMAGE CAN GENERATE MORE DETAIL

Surprising, eh ?! It would never have occured to me, but this guy claims to have done it:

https://tech.kateva.org/2007/08/quick-and-dirty-album-imaging.html

Unsure of any relevance to the project. I came across it while following up the 'Simulation Hypothesis' for an essay on Descartes, and thought I'd share.

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https://www.instagram.com/juliecouzens/

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Thomas Sauvin, Beijing Silvermine

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Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the capital and the life of its inhabitants following the Cultural Revolution. It covers a period of 20 years, from 1985, namely when silver film started being used massively in China, to 2005, when digital photography started taking over. These 20 years are those of China's economic opening, when people started prospering, travelling, consuming, having fun.

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High Wycombe circa 2020

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https://www.findstoragefast.com/blog/4-reasons-why-people-keep-things/

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Here is where I've reached with my Padlet - 146 Tweedsmuir Road.
https://padlet.com/sarahlbcassidy/whnecs8f9k0yvk22

It shares photos of my family, the Cassidys, taken at my Granny's house, a small council house where she has lived for 73 years.

I've tried to think about how space could be used to explore the photos - showing how many memories and moments have happened within any one corner of the house.

Covid-19 means Granny Jess is, for the first time, alone in the house, unable to have visitors. During this time she keeps telling us she can't stand to be alone in the house, and she wants to move. This has made me reflect on what makes a house a home, and who gets left behind when we come to inhabit digital space in place of reality.

This particular image reminded me of the recent images sent to me by my uncle, in which he has to speak to her through the glass, while she is inside the house alone.

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Keepsakes, Precious Things - Julie Couzens

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Keepsakes, Precious Things - Julie Couzens

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This was a series of work some many years ago which I want to revisit. I found it interesting the items that people or families held onto over many moves and losses. The items that had no meaning to anyone else, but were always precious to that one person. How do you discard what was once loved, now that that beloved has left this earth?

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Are childhood pictures something we need to hide, or be proud of that right of passage...does vanity keep them hidden

https://padlet.com/juliescouzens/m7axtq0ziohrlzaw

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Not socially isolating

Image: Radiohead crowd at The Venue,
Oxford, 1993(?).

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Oxford, 2019

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I'm now starting to think how some of the images and text I've been collecting might work in terms of form. I'm now wishing I had three iPads in the house : ))

The text is from a WeChat message, the picture on the right sent by WeChat and the photo on the left one I took on a visit the following year.

Ther are afew more examples, all works in progress, on my padlet page.

https://en-gb.padlet.com/kjburrell1/vgzhrxonnr3y

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"Meanwhile, the weeds still blossom"
#polaroid using out of date film stock.  Reflects the way many of us feel, we don't know what the outcome will be, other than this will pass and leave its presence.

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Here are some more images.  I have set up a Padlet for some research and ideas and images and the link is here:  https://padlet.com/amandadenny/bzmr4mtthsys but it is still in a very raw state, so please bear with me for now. I will also be adding image titles in due course. Some interesting ideas on social distancing and take away here.

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Progressing from last week, I have decided include more archival and community dialogue references, including looking at the Cholera outbreaks in Oxford in 1832 and 1854.  I will no longer bring in the references to my mother at this stage, I will continue to question "Why do I?" but I have extracted the word "Meanwhile" used significantly in Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" to indicate the continuity of things and add the elements of hope and light.
I am using both both analogue and digital responses in my image making.

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This week I took some time to finally learn how to use a few basic tools of Photoshop.The picture you see is one of the first experiments with the program. My first creative achievement during the lockdown. It might not be a big deal for most of you, but I'm excited because I can recreate my archives and build my narrative through digital collages while I'm away from manual tools.

Figure:   My grandad worked for the Portuguese colonial cruise companies and many others around the world.

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Piracicaba, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2018.
When your own mind load you in a isolated condition. Just few random memories connecting you with the world around. As a virus, the Alzheimer disease imposed a increaseling lockdown for my grandmama in her last years. Those photos are from our last photo session when she was 96, six months before she passed.  For me her eyes and attitude facing the lens are to look for interaction, fellings and meanings.

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Gone but not forgotten: HMV?

HMV is the most popular retailer in the UK. But over the years, it has run into some tough times. In 2013,HMV went into administration and was going to close down permanently, but they bounced back. Last year however, they went into administration again, due to low sales and an increase in online shipping and the download culture. Now with the current lockdown, their situation has only gotten more difficult.

Oxford once had an HMV store but that closed down years ago and now Leon stands in its place.

The picture you see is the HMV in Reading, but at this point, I do not know if it has closed down or not. The blurriness of the picture reflects the uncertainty of HMV's future as no one knows how long the retailer will last.

While shopping online is easier than travelling to your local HMV store,I found it to be very lazy and alienating as you are simply paying a screen instead of an actual human being. The journey is half the fun. If HMV goes under completely, the world will lose an icon of entertainment.

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In this case, I took the sound directly from a video and mixed it with a video I made the other day I went out to do sports.

I am looking at nature and the last days I am reviewing old ideas of evolution, with the intention of thinking about the way in which we will get out of this contingency.

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Dan Giannopoulos explains what drew him to start photographing the discarded plastic gloves he found on the street as the coronavirus began to affect the way of life in the UK.

Like everyone else, the coronavirus pandemic has had a massive impact on life as I knew it.

As a photographer, during the beginning of the lockdown, I had thought about ways to document these surreal times from home.

After spending a number of days without leaving the confines of my house early last week I decided to go for a short walk and was surprised to see the number of discarded rubber gloves and surgical masks on the streets of my neighbourhood, a small suburb in Nottingham.

I began to photograph them in situ throughout the duration of the 30-minute walk. These disposable gloves quickly came to represent the sheer scale of the public health crisis.

The artefacts of the paranoia and panic that people are feeling under the immense pressure of this invisible killer.

These discarded gloves also represented, to me, our own virulent impact on the environment. If this small sample is anything to go by then there are hundreds of thousands of these gloves scattered across the empty public spaces of this country.

The gloves had gathered in gutters, protruded from bushes and bins, were strewn on doorsteps and forced through wire fences. I couldn't walk more than a few metres without finding one. And over the course of the next four days I continued to go out for my permitted daily exercise and zigzagged through my neighbourhood again and again focusing each time on a different area.

Covering a radius of less than a mile, I found in excess of 300 discarded gloves and masks.

I'd produced a similar project a number of years back charting discarded drug baggies in south London. For that project I catalogued just over 400 bags during the course of three years. With this project, I found more than three-quarters of that number in four days.

Producing this body of work is an obvious continuation of some of the themes that I explored in the earlier project but in the context of a terrifying global health crisis. This small neighbourhood sample gives an indication of the unprecedented level of fear that we are all living under and the profound irony of our damaging nature.

All photographs courtesy Dan Giannopoulos

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In pictures: Discarded disposable gloves

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Dan Giannopoulos explains what drew him to start photographing the discarded plastic gloves he found on the street as the coronavirus began to affect the way of life in the UK. Like everyone else, the coronavirus pandemic has had a massive impact on life as I knew it.

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Article: How to be a Photographer Right Now by Aaron Schuman

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Three artists confront how COVID-19 has changed their lives and work-and how they see the world.

By Aaron Schuman

One morning at the end of February, I was sitting in Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, a grease-stained diner directly across from the Flatiron Building in New York. (Monas Eisenberg opened the shop in 1929, in hopes that it might get him and his family through the Great Depression.) I'd just arrived in New York for a flying visit, and I was feeling hazy and jet-lagged. Knowing that I'd be up early, I'd arranged to have breakfast with the photographer Gus Powell.

When Powell arrived, he wrapped his bag and bright red coat around the back of his chair and apologized for being a few minutes late. He'd just dropped off "the VIPs"-his children-at school in Brooklyn. Over our pastrami and eggs, we talked shop-mostly photobooks, new projects, his commercial portfolio, and parenting. We were both scheduled to have exhibitions and workshops at Micamera in Milan in the coming months, but because there were four hundred reported cases of coronavirus in Italy, it looked likely that our shows might get postponed for a few weeks. Powell was on his way downtown for a meeting with an advertising agency, and I was headed uptown to the Met, so as we hurried out into midmorning rush hour, we shook hands, hugged, and went opposite ways on a frenetic Fifth Avenue.

That was then.

I often have anxiety-driven dreams, in which I'm endlessly racing through a crowded, anonymous, Gotham-like metropolis, trying in vain to catch a subway, train, or plane that I'm desperately late for. I've been having a lot of those dreams lately. Now, in self-isolation in my attic-cum-home-office in the southwest of England for the past nineteen days, I've started to wonder if I've gone stir-crazy. Had my breakfast with Gus, in fact, just been the opening scene to another one of these strangely pedestrian nightmares?

On March 13, Bloomberg published a series of photographs by Powell titled What Social Distancing Looks Like in Public Spaces. "The editors of Bloomberg Businessweek reached out to me on March 4 and asked if I'd make a portfolio of images that showed signs of current 'social distancing' in New York," Powell wrote to me recently in an email. "I'd already made a few images on the subway of hands avoiding poles, and had been thinking a lot about how to photograph public space in the city at this specific moment in time." Powell shot the assignment throughout the following week. "I went to the busy places that I always frequent when I'm making my own work-the Financial District, Herald Square, Fifth Avenue-as well as areas that I knew would be farther along in terms of practicing social distancing, like Main Street in Flushing, Queens."

As Powell sees it, the pictures published by Bloomberg were those that represented the clearest manifestations of change, specifically hand etiquette on the subway. "But the ones that I'm most interested in," he added, "are those where there is still little sign of change at all-pictures that may be a last look at public life in New York before COVID-19." When I first saw his Bloomberg story, I was slightly worried about Powell's safety, but he told me he hadn't left Brooklyn since Friday, March 13. "I walked two-thirds of the way across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then turned back."

Since the onset of the pandemic, many photographers have been seeking ways to capture this moment in time in a safe yet productive way. On March 20, National Geographic published a story online by the Tehran-based photographer Newsha Tavakolian about the "hard pause" the coronavirus has caused in Iran. (Its subtitle referred to the "suspended state of life in the country.") "I was already two weeks into self-isolation when Nat Geo 's editors contacted me," Tavakolian, who has covered social issues in Iran, Syria, and Russia, said by email. "I had to think about it carefully. Naturally, I was worried about the virus and about potentially infecting others, so I decided to try to make an intimate report. For the most part I stayed close to my own surroundings-although I did also go along on several disinfection patrols."

Iran was among the first countries outside of China to be hit by the epidemic. By accepting the National Geographic assignment, Tavakolian explained that she "was trying to show the readers what sort of life was coming for them. Of course, citizen-journalists are capturing many things on social media, but I think that there will be a need for professional reporting now more than ever, as in the aftermath of all of this there will be plenty of debates about truths and facts. I hope that this massive crisis will lead to a renewed appreciation of our profession," she added, "and a realization that independent reporting is key, especially in difficult times."

The crisis is not only affecting photographers engaged in documentary and reportage, but also practitioners who work in a wide array of genres. "Art always feels somewhat inconsequential in times of real crisis," lens-based artist Hannah Whitaker, who lives in New York and is well known for her experimental, multilayered and semiabstracted studio-based photographic approach, noted in an email. "But I know it's important. It might not be able to get us out of this crisis, but it can help us out of our holes-like Ariana Reines' recent new moon report, ' Our Crown,' in Artforum, which gave words to that strange combination of death and mundanity that characterizes this moment."

For many studio-based artists and photographers, like Whitaker, social distancing and self-isolation are not entirely unfamiliar territory when it comes to being both productive and creative. "In some ways, my life is ideally suited for this crisis," Whitaker explained. "Solitude and volatility are baked into being an artist, and usually I thrive in those conditions. I like being alone and normally embrace these kinds of structural limitations: What can I do with one sheet of 4×5 film? What photograph can I make with just the lighting and props I have on hand?" Whitaker acknowledges that she can walk to her studio, where she has all the equipment she needs, and can work alone-that is, when she isn't looking after her three-year-old son. "But today is my day to stay at home with my son, who hasn't played with another child in over three weeks," she said, "so to be honest, I'm having a hard time."

The potential long-term effects of all of this are also starting to weigh on the minds of many photographers and artists. "I can deal with the normal ups and downs of my income and so on," Whitaker noted, "but what's new now is that I'm aware of the fact that this down may not be followed by an up for a long time, and may go deeper than any I've known. I know how lucky I am to be an artist, but I've worked my whole life to build this life as an artist-a life that is central to my selfhood-and that's what I worry could be lost."

From studio practice to commercial and editorial work, all photographers are aware that we are entering a new landscape. "Everything feels different now," Powell told me, "and I'm uncertain about how to push my practice forward right now. There's a different sense of time, which is simultaneously both intimate and global; sometimes the clock seems to be ticking very loudly, and other times not at all." To keep himself busy and inspired, Powell explained that he's reading a lot, looking at photobooks-"They still work, and will keep on working," he stressed-and trying to make pictures of his life: his home, his children climbing trees, or the streets of Brooklyn from the driver's seat of his car on a run for groceries.

"I'm not thinking about maintaining what I've already done," Powell said, "but instead about how something new can be made, and about the kind of artist I want to be. I'm asking myself, How I can contribute to humanity with creativity and honesty? "

For Tavakolian, who has had her press credentials revoked several times in Iran, including just this past year, periods of being unable to work freely are nothing new. Like Powell, she sees the "pause" as an opportunity to broaden her vision. She suggests reading, slowing down, and revisiting unfinished projects. "I believe that this is a time to take in what is happening, and let everything sink in," she said. "There will be a life after coronavirus, and we will be able to work and be creative. If there is any silver lining to this hard pause that we all face now as photographers-and as humans-it's that disruption can lead to creativity. You can end up doing things that you never dreamed you'd do."
Aaron Schuman is a photographer, writer, and curator based in Bristol, England.

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Three artists confront how COVID-19 has changed their lives and work-and how they see the world. By Aaron Schuman One morning at the end of February, I was sitting in Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, a grease-stained diner directly across from the Flatiron Building in New York.

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Vienna and Giant Ferris Wheel
The giant Ferris wheel is one of the most famous attractions in Vienna. It was featured during a key scene in the noir classic The Third Man. During the scene, Orson Wells meets with Joseph Cotton and they ride the Ferris wheel together and Orson delivers his famous speech about the "dots" on the ground below them.

In the picture, everyone have gathered to ride the famous wheel. It is a memorable experience to wide in the same carriage that Wells once rode in and catch the great view from above.

Late 2018, I went to Vienna with my father and we visited the Ferris wheel. Unfortunately I never got the chance to ride it. Still the fact the I stood beneath it is good enough for me. It was still unforgettable.

With the lockdown in place, the wheel has been shut down and there are no crowds. Closet anyone will get to the wheel so watching Third Man

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This week I’ve created a series of padlets in the hope of finding a thread to link my archive to the current situation. I’ve found too many tenuous links and have been trying to make sense of them in order to understand isolation as an experience. I’ve been looking back at other periods in my life where I’ve lived in isolated places, at family holidays that throw us all together at once, and at communities permanently isolated by physical location or cultural split. I’m trying to understand how the experience differs if it is chosen or enforced and how our perspective on it affects how we feel about it. We’re all wrapped up in this together but are experiencing it very differently. My thoughts are fairly muddled right now on https://padlet.com/etainocarroll/5xfsajfjnjhl but possibly the next step is to look at what links us and divides us at these times and if it’s possible to uncover any universal truths that we can learn from.

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I've spent the week rereading the WeChat pages that went between Oxford and Shanghai  while my son was living there from 2013 to 2020. This has been frustrating at times as you have to scroll on a phone which refreshes quite slowly and, if you come out of the app it goes back to the start. It's bit like paying a computer game.

Looking back on the archive it is clear that our communication is very different to what we might have had if we'd sent letters, which would have been the case 25 years ago, or emails which would have been the case 10 years ago. WeChat messages, like WhatsApp, are short, functional, awash with emojis. They re chatty, often superficial, sometimes emotional and sentimental, sometimes jokey and often depending on pictures for much of their meaning. Yet that superficiality accumulates over time to become something much richer.

The pictures on WeChat contrast with those I took during my annual visits and there is an interesting dialogue between them.  My photographs give a greater sense of place and relationships and form a separate but overlapping archive.

To get the raw material for the project in place I've extracted a mix of screen shots and downloads of images from Wechat which I'm now relating to both my own photographs and events in the world at the time. The screenshot below was four weeks after the 2016 Brexit vote.

This will echo how many relations are currently taking place although the development of Zoom and other streaming platforms is now much more developed developed. Even 3 years ago Skyping to China was very unreliable and was a bit like the clips of astronauts talking from Apollo craft in my childhood.

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From our last meeting I took the question Sunil asked "How to build our own archive?"

I am approaching the question by thinking of virtual information and the Infodemic we live in, related to (my) body as an archive.

Where does my body store the virtual information I consume during the lockdown? How to build an archive from an abstract gathering or accumulation?

I started filming a minute every day, as part of an exploratory process, having my movements in the enviroment limited, my mind is wandering everywhere with a lot of information and sometimes my eyes are looking for a long time still to a same point.

I propouse the images as a diary, collecting words that are booming on me through my "virtual life". I am exploring the video as a photography, observing how difficult it is for me to stay calm for a minute.

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Protecting the Past....

This was the image I submitted to become a member of the group. It's an image of my dad, just before we left to travel to Australia becoming part of the community of £10 Poms who flocked to a new challenge in life. I've always had a love of photography and I think that comes from my dad who was a prolific snapper of our ever changing life and adventures in Australia. It's been part of my life and a love... just wish I could spend more time doing it....In recent years I felt a drive to archive our families many photographs and would like to archive my own immediate and extended families photographs in some sort of online archive for generations to come.

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In anticipation
Quarantine diary of an expectant mother

When our daily activities outside the house have been cancelled, we were forced to refocus and look inwards. Time is passing, we are anticipating the end of the quarantine, our lives to resume. What will the life be like again? I’m seven and a half months pregnant, in isolation since the beginning of March; I watch my bump grow, spring unfold, life is a constant process of waiting now.

Our third daughter is due to be born in mid June. How will this new life be shaped by what is happening now and what is due to happen? Our current lives have already changed so much. Home has become a schooling space at times, a working space, a living space, a vessel which we cannot abandon and through which lots of different energies and feelings are channeled.

Nothing is like it used to be. There is no morning rush to get everyone and everything ready for school and work, there is no school/-work structure in place any more. Everything blends in, one week becomes another, we don’t even notice it any more. The time is so fluid.

There is a striking paralel between expecting a baby and anticipating the end of the quarantine. The feeling of patient waiting and letting things unfold is shared. The body withdrawal, the nature taking over, the life being suspended. But there is also a paradox in it: the giving of life in the times when so many lives are lost.

I’d like to look more throughly into this changed notion of home, into motherhood in the times of quarantine. I don’t yet have a title for this project nor a specific structure. It’s a bit of a flow now.

This is the first image. I’m reconnecting with my younger daughter here in early hours of the morning when the sun has just just come out. She knows I can’t sleep that well any more and often wakes up very early too to keep me company and experiment with the camera (which in the times before the outbreak would be an impossible as she used to find me as a photographer really annoying).

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Anywhere but here: Karaoke

I have always wanted to sing in a karaoke bar and I got the chance in Japan. Karaoke is the best way to let yourself go and just enjoy yourself while singing your favourite songs. Karaoke originated in Japan years ago and has since become popular all over the world and for good reason.

This picture sums up why karaoke is a fantastic activity. When you are with your closest friends, you can forget about the stress in your life, the torture of going through the same routine and just indulge yourself and go crazy all night.

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Anywhere but Here: Tokyo

This picture encapsulates the first experience of someone visiting Tokyo Japan. Bright lights, fast pace of the crowds and vivid colours leaves you Awestrucked but also disoriented and overwhelmed. This is exactly how I felt when I visited Japan with my father.

It a large city like Japan, it is easy to get list in such an unforgettable place.

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Reading: Interview with artist Felicia Honkasalo

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Do objects have a relationship to each other outside of human relations? Object orientated philosophers contend that they do, critiquing the Kantian philosophical tradition of anthropocentrism that places objects as subordinate to humans and their cognition. I wonder about this thinking of the latent reality of the objects and documents in Felicia Honsksalo's book, , based on her grandfather's work archive. As a geologist, he collected and recorded his work meticulously, revealing a life of research, experiments, specimens, samples and equipment. None of this meant anything to Felicia, only that it was compelling enough to become part of an enquiry into the materials she sifted through to learn something of her grandfather, whom she hardly knew in person. Grey Cobalt is published by Loose Joints and the following conversation took place over email in February and March 2019.

SS: Can you tell us about how this project came about and how this relates to your wider practice and interests in photography?

FH: My story began with objects. When my grandfather died, I lived in London, and was not present when his belongings were divided amongst relatives. I had very few washed out and faded memories of him from my childhood, but even then, he had seemed to be an elusive character, very different from my grandmother, with whom I had a close relationship to as a child. In my family home, in which my parents still live, unfamiliar objects started to appear, and on one visit from London I opened the attic doors to find boxes and boxes of books and papers. Slowly I started rummaging through them, in search of an idea of the person that had passed away. That perhaps these papers or things could explain to me what had happened, who he had been. In my mind, these pictures of minerals, medals, open cast mines, furnaces, factories, miners, steel sheets and rolls were marking a path to a world in which I could find the person that had disappeared. I started to read about metallurgy and enrolled on a course on geology. I visited museums, looked at core samples, went to factories, studied the intricate drawings of furnaces, trying to form an image in my mind as to what this was all about.

If I had no grounded memories of the person who had passed away, did he really exist? Could I find the memories somewhere else? Could I create them? I started looking at the objects in a different way, organizing them into groups based first on intuition and then on a system I created. They became, for me, souvenirs from the past, souvenirs that had outlived their owners. I started to see a pattern emerge, in which specific artefacts seemed to hold inside them a hidden narrative, as if they were silent about the story I wanted to discover. I catalogued all the objects by taking photographs of them, after which I regrouped them according to how they appeared to me. Through a language I felt was hidden inside the objects, I wanted to see if these objects could reveal something through my images.

Having never known him, remembering for me is an act of reconstructing through imagination not only a person, but a world that once existed. Being a man dedicated to his work, the inherited artefacts were not perhaps the usual heirlooms. In the process of creating metals, that are vital to our materialistic existence, rock matter is poured into a furnace turning it into molten matter. There is something captivating about this act, as it is precisely in this state that the earth once was, and how the core of the earth still is. Whereas geologists use rock layers to read the timeline of the earth, in a furnace, we fast track through all that history, back to the start of our time. I like to think of the work as a capsule of space and time like that of a cabinet of curiosities, where the disparate collected objects help one form a tactile experience of a lost world. And like all collections, they evoke an ever-present absence.

What started out as an act of mourning, turned over the years into a complex set of questions through which I tried to understand and investigate the possibilities of making a portrait of someone lost to the sea of time. How could I make sense of, primarily a person's death, but also, and maybe more importantly, that they had once existed, lived a life, but had now disappeared. In an interview with Christian Scholz, W.G. Sebald verbalises my main concerns in a very precise manner:

"You cannot imagine what it is, this slow dissolution of life over many decades. And that is something absolutely monstrous (Ungeheures) to me: having to witness this and having to take into account the possibility that this real person who is now, in the year 1999, let's say eighty-five years old, back then supposedly was only twenty-two years old. Is something like that possible? Can we get that into our heads? What do we do with this information?"

By exploring these ideas through photography, the work is also a commentary on photography itself. Through very minimal visual information, I try to unfold and make use of this impulse we have to grab hold of that which is evanescent by making a permanent record of it, and the failure of making that record. What is held onto through a photograph, is no longer the disappearing object itself but something that appears or becomes visible in the moment of its vanishing: as it were, the last glance that it casts at us, or the last glimpse of it that we can catch.

SS: There is an interesting relationship here between the transience of human life and the permanence of matter and the hope that something of your grandfather can be recouped from within the objects and documents of his life. I am interested in the process of activating this archive which for me greatly includes the act of sifting through his belongings, making sense of them, research, learning and photography, the creation of a new archival order, for you, one day to be passed down to your relatives. For me this act of activation of this material goes beyond its photography. It is a relationship to absence and to loss, the belief that in the material we can find access to the spiritual. I love this belief in the power of objects, aesthetics aside, it is cosmological at the atomic level; harking back to the fact that all matter was created in the origins of the universe. We are all made up of the same matter and it is our spirit that resides within matter, so looking at objects to find a person doesn't seem at all absurd, does it?

FH: This is really interesting, because on the one hand I agree, that yes, at times it seems as if the spirit of someone resides within matter, but then when I was working on this project, I came to look at it from another angle, that rather we place that spirit within the object, we project ourselves onto them and anthropomorphize these independent things. The object itself is something else, has its own hidden trajectory, and agency, which we know nothing about. People have throughout history had a need to place objects near the final resting places of the dead, from the paraphernalia placed inside tombs of Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt to the votive offerings laid along graves in Catholic countries. What fascinates me, is that these objects have had the occupation of keeping the dead close to the living, but they have also been placed there in order to gain favor with supernatural forces. Grave goods are still placed into caskets for example in Finnish secular society, and they are seen to serve the purpose of aiding the journey of the deceased on its migration to the unknown. But then at the same time these objects really only serve us, the living, in helping us deal with the death of someone close to us. An archaeologist from the University of Helsinki told me once how funeral homes in Helsinki have had problems with mourners placing mobile phones into caskets, as the batteries explode in the furnace of the crematorium, causing irreparable damages. The problem has been solved by advising mourners to take out the battery before dropping the phone in with the deceased. I see this mobile phone as being something that eases the pain of the mourner, rather than easing the afterlife of the one who has parted, but who knows maybe I'm wrong. I do still wonder, what is it that objects hold, that has made them the laborers of memory and mourning? Of course, one aspect is the tactile function, objects are something we can hold and caress, or kick, something we are in active relation to, rather than the more complex feelings related to mourning, death and facing our own dissolution.

SS: What do you feel you learned about your grandfather and his world in this project?

FH: My grandfather's story is of course the one that many will attach themselves to, but I would find it important that people also try and see the context as something involving a much larger narrative, like you mentioned in your reply. During my process I was interested in how these independent, witness bearing entities communicated, to me, aspects of this complex relationship between my own, fleeting, disloyal memories and these almost eternal, solid forms that had seen so much, yet withheld all that information. I would touch their material surface and by investigating the circumstances in which they were born, questioning the landscape they were from, I came to recognize that they have capacities to interfere and disrupt historical moments. That was a really important turning point for me. It is not a purely human history that I want to convey in the book, rather a much larger narrative that humans usually overlook. For me that was really essential, to see these inanimate objects as having agency, and having them telling their story, if you can say that.

These encounters with the landscape and the objects driven out from the depths of the earth made me question the usefulness of depicting a human history, and rather I started to be more and more interested in the hidden history within these objects and places. Take for example Nickel, there is a town in Russia named after the hard and ductile metal. It's very valuable in modern industry, but it is also an essential nutrient for quite a few living things, and furthermore occurs in meteorites that fall from the sky. Some believe life came to earth on these falling rocks containing nickel. The biggest reserves are believed to be inside the earth, at the centre, that is a like a massive tangible chewing gum. It's a headache for the mining industry, as it's a vast money pot that we have no access to. It is also believed that Nickel played a part in the Great Dying, the end-Permian extinction, causing 90% of the world's species to die some 252 million years ago. It created much of human history, if you can put it like that, through its human use in armaments production, and battles were fought to keep or overtake nickel reserves. This metal is a perfect example of how everything is interconnected, in intra-action with each and everything, and in this way, you can say metals like Nickel, have capacities to interfere and disrupt historical moments, and human lives. Everything is intertwined. To borrow Karen Barad: "We" are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity [...] I don't want the human to be in Nature, as if Nature is a container. Identity is inherently unstable, differentiated, dispersed, and yet strangely coherent."

I love how she goes on to say that knowing can never be fully claimed as being a fully human practice because we use nonhuman elements when we discover and build on our knowledge, and how do we know in what ways these elements interfere and disrupt, distort this knowledge that we claim to be scientific evidence, for example.

I was looking through some of my grandfather's books, and I came across this really beautiful quote by Pliny the Elder that was included in The History of Metals, published by MacDonald & Evans. It was originally written for his magnum opus, the Natural History encyclopaedia. In the quote he foresees human greed relating to metals, and he wrote it sometime in AD 79. I felt it was like an omen. The beginning of this quote is included in the book. So, to cut a long story short, perhaps I didn't really learn anything about my grandfather, but through what he left behind, I discovered a completely unknown world, that had been present all along.

SS: There is a strong metaphor in this work for what constitutes technological progress from ancient times through to the present manifest in the extraction of useful metals for humankind's advancement. I wanted to ask about how your findings were reconciled in your visual approach and decision making around text and contributions for the book. Are you able to describe how your feelings for these objects and documents become artistic and aesthetic choices?

FH: I'm using the history and the mining of metals as my starting point, as my grandfather was said to be a man dedicated to his work and his profession was metallurgy. In a sort of Marxist way, I thought that if I were to look for who he might have been, I was to look at the work that he did, to really understand it, infiltrate the scene so to speak. The work that he did, influenced his life, but also the life of his children, and I think it also trickled down to us, his grandchildren.

However, as I worked longer on the project, I came to realise that I wanted textual elements to merge with the visual, so that each would support the other by opening portals to different ways of understanding the work. I built the texts as a kind of map or a set of clues, (I have been really impressed and inspired by George Perec's Life a User's Manual) that in case the viewer wanted, they could look for different meanings in the images, that went deeper than just the visual. The texts were of course also necessary as the historical context was so specific, that part of Finnish history is riddled with uncomfortable truths that people are maybe only now starting to talk about, as the past generation starts to disappear. I think artists have a responsibility to respond to incidents in their own culture.

In an aesthetic and textual sense, I also wanted to recreate the levels of different times I was working with, and to see them in a way as sort of happening at the same time, that there is no past, no present, or future, just this one, stretching and contracting idea of time. Things can happen simultaneously, or in the wrong order, the past can collapse into the future. I guess I'm interested in the impossibility of trying to build a bridge between the living and the dead, reality and art, history and memory, or memory and oblivion.

And then naturally, I felt it really important to add the factual elements in the writing, to point in a very concrete way to the politics and polemics of mining. Otherwise the book would aestheticize something horrendous, and I was aware that that was a really big issue. I was intrigued by the idea that this beautiful, almost otherworldly rock material containing vital elements, had, in human hands turned into something abhorrent that was necessary for our industrial and material trajectory. However, in saying this, I think it's also really important to stress the fact that I do not see myself as outside of this process. Here I am, writing this off a MacBook, reaping the benefits of these technological advancements that have made all these products and ways of life possible, for some.

SS: I am very interested in how cultural inflections and histories emerge and coexist in a book presented in English. While I recognise the necessity of a common language and the reach that provides in terms of audience, I like that you've stated there is a strong articulation of Finnish culture and history that is re-worked in the present by you as someone who in this case, is positioned across cultural boundaries - Finnish and English. The "visual" which can be thought of as general or universal is diverted towards aspects of the culturally specific with the text. It is an important site of articulating your Finnishness. Is this positioning of culture within work made in Finland a strong current amongst artists, or something you are particularly attune to? In speaking between cultures, is this a comfortable place for you or a problematic one?

FH: Yes, I completely agree with you that translating aspects of another culture into a different language is always difficult, and sometimes seems to me, impossible. I would love to read all books in the original language they were written in, it feels one is always missing out when reading a translation, however good it is. It's still an ongoing project for me, to learn at least Russian, so that I could read Russian literature in the original form.

During my childhood I spent long periods of time living in various places, and with time, Finland did start to feel, in a peculiar way, foreign to me. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that I didn't attend a Finnish speaking school until I was 16, so my grasp of the language is, in a way, limited. I used to write a lot when I was younger, but always struggled to find my own language when I wrote, a way to truly express my ideas, so I think photography for me opened up a way to tell the same stories and investigate the same themes through mute images rather than words. Writing still plays an important part in my work, and I think the biggest influences come from the novels I read.

I think this moving around also influenced the way in which I see the world, how I create meaning in it. It is also the reason why archives play such an important part in my work, that those few items and things salvaged when moving, in a way, are an archive of the past that you are about to leave behind. Why are some things saved, others lost? The sense of history we gain from visiting archives, is one which derives from a loaded space. Yet it is a fundamental need that we seem to have, to collect and then preserve, in a strict order, as if there only existed a thin sheet between our very existence and our disappearance, and by preserving artefacts and documents, we somehow hope that we are able continue to exist eternally. To have your narrative immortalized in a story is a way of marking your lived existence as a unique being. In our personal archives, we keep a very carefully curated version of our past, which mirrors all the other archives, in its play of inclusion and exclusion.

A bit on a side street here, so going back to your original question, I do think translating distorts, always. However, with this work, I think the aspects of Finnish culture I speak of are historical and point to a specific time that the whole of Europe shares. This act of silencing a darker area of history is shared across cultures, and I think the form it takes is quite similar, which in a way is interesting. Therefore, I did not find it a problem to be using English. To use a language that only 5 million people speak would feel to me like another act of silencing, when the histories and timeframes I talk about are shared by so many.

I don't think you can ever separate the personal from the historical, and I was interested in how bigger historical events influenced personal decisions and also vice versa. For example, my grandparents met during the war in Petsamo, in Northern Finland. They were working at the Nickel factory there. Just before the war, the nickel deposits had been deemed to be the richest in Europe. Germany depended on nickel for their war effort, and the allies tried to stop them from obtaining it. There were political and armed conflicts relating to the access of these ore deposits, and it therefore affected many of the major political decisions of that time. This is an overlooked area in history, that many are not aware of, but I found it intriguing to follow how ore was moving armies across Europe. The area now belongs to Russia.

I tried to visit the place, Petsamo, or Pechengsky District as it's now known, when I was working on this body of work, but it's all a military zone. It's close to the Arctic so no one is really allowed in. The reason they are turning those areas into military zones, is because everyone is waiting for the ice to melt so that they can start drilling the oil reserves, but also the ore deposits, under the ice. That landscape was affecting the whole of Europe during WW2, and some believe during the End-Permian Extinction. The same is happening now, without people really realising it, or maybe caring about it. Some thought we were bringing the world to an end with WW2, and now we are again at a point where the world most likely will end, due to climate change caused by us.

But I also have to point out that this reference to Finnish culture is only one slice of time that the book deals with. In the book you can follow the personal or historical traces, or you can choose a larger timescale by investigating the geological traces, and their timeline. Maybe the last option of three is what I wish people would eventually think about when they have seen the work. Our story, or the story of one culture is only a drop in the sea, whereas I feel we should be talking about the history of those unseen and forgotten histories that have dominated our past and is dominating also our future.
Grey Cobalt
Loose Joints

(All Rights Reserved. Text @ Sunil Shah & Felicia Honkasalo. Images @ Felicia Honkasalo.)

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Felicia Honkasalo: Objects and Ontologies

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"What is held onto through a photograph, is no longer the disappearing object itself but something that appears or becomes visible in the moment of its vanishing: as it were, the last glance that it casts at us, or the last glimpse of it that we can catch."

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The children in the image are now in their late 40s. Some may still be living in Oxfordshire with children now participating in current Fusion projects. Others may have moved to far flung places. Either way, they are currently experiencing similar things. From the 1982/83 album.

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A photograph that sits in a family holiday album (in Croydon at that point) whilst also appearing in the Fusion Arts archive from the early 80s.

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When young I was facinated by images of American Indians - Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Sioux,..... Once proud people with magnificient head gears and weathered looks, now only appreciated from old photos.
This image of Weasel Tail was taken by the famous photographer of the time - Edward Curtis c1900. I downloaded a scanned copy from a library of photos. Original image had turned brown with age. I removed all the scratches and dust marks and restored it to better state. Another project coming up - restoring images North American Indians from old archives!!

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Anywhere but Here: Japan

For my new archive I plan to collect pictures of locations I have visited with friends and family and contrast them with pictures of the UK. As the title suggests, I find more enjoyment and freedom in other countries than I do in my home country and this archive will explore my feelings towards Britain in comparison to my feelings towards the countries I have visited in the last two years of my life.

The image you see is during my holiday in Japan. I am taking pictures of the list mountains. My attention is on them and nothing else.

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Not socially isolating

My early attempts of being a gig/concert photographer were taken with a compact film camera. I was very much experimenting with the idea of being a photographer, this also included what was valid subject matter to take a picture of. e.g. the crowd as well as the band on stage.

Going to a gig/concert was and is, in a sense a community dialogue, be it a physical and now digital one (as so much gig content is generated and shared online).

In respects to where we are today with the current crisis, who knows where and when the next generation of gig/concert goers will enjoy a night out at their local music venue?

Image: RIDE crowd at Jericho Tavern, Oxford, 1994.

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Alone with Empire Project Film

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From over 800 films, and 400 hours of footage, ‘Alone with Empire’ is an installation that allows an archive to reveal itself – creating a unique visual experience that questions the legacy of the British Empire.

This installation provided a critical space to be alone with films from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection (BECC), aiming to challenge the ways in which colonial film footage can be presented and experienced.

By embracing ‘chaos’ as a creative method to question how we understand historical narratives, a digital interface was used to generate randomised film pieces presenting each visitor with their own unique sequence of colonial film footage. Alejandro Acín and Isaac Blease, the producers of Alone with Empire say: ‘’We see our role as facilitating public access and participation with this important collection, and through doing so we aim to form a critical space in which visitors can question and reflect upon the murky history of the British Empire.”

The resulting visual experiences were catalogued by visitors using emotional keywords, and all the films generated became part of a new counter-archive, which will be hosted on a dedicated project website. Nicky Sugar, BECC archivist says: “Over the last 3 years we’ve made 220 digitised films from the British Empire and Commonwealth available from the Bristol Archives search-room. But we want to reach a much wider audience across the city and beyond, so we’re delighted to be involved in this project.”

The full Alone with Empire team is: Isaac Blease (Curator), Alejandro Acin (Art Director), Nick Diacre (Software Designer), Alessandro Altavilla (Sound Designer), Edson Burton (Scriptwriter & Narrator), Giya Makondo-Wills, Shawn Sobers, Jayne Pucknell, Nicky Sugar (Steering Group) and Bismark Tackie (Web developer). 

This installation is produced by IC Visual Lab in conjunction with Bristol Archives, and is supported by the Arts Council of England, and Heritage Lottery Fund. 

Alone with Empire run from the 1st – 15th of October 2018.

Video Film & Editing: Rexton Film & Audio

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Alone with Empire trailer

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ALONE WITH EMPIRE

1st - 15th of October 2018
At the Vestibules Art Space 
(Deanery Road side) at Bristol City Hall 
College Green, Bristol, BS1 5TR
Opening times: 11am to 6pm (Excluding Weekends)

This installation provides a critical space to be alone with films from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection (BECC), aiming to challenge the ways in which colonial film footage can be presented and experienced.

By embracing ‘chaos’ as a creative method to question how we understand historical narratives, a digital interface is used to generate randomized film pieces presenting each visitor with their own unique sequence of colonial film footage. Alejandro Acín and Isaac Blease, the creative producers of Alone with Empire say: ‘’We see our role as facilitating public access and participation with this important collection, and through doing so we aim to form a critical space in which visitors can question and reflect upon the murky history of the British Empire.”

The resulting visual experiences will be catalogued by visitors using emotional keywords, and all the films generated will become part of a new counter-archive, which will be hosted on a dedicated project website. Nicky Sugar, BECC archivist says: “Over the last 3 years we’ve made 220 digitised films from the British Empire and Commonwealth available from the Bristol Archives search-room. But we want to reach a much wider audience across the city and beyond, so we’re delighted to be involved in this project.”

This event is organized by IC Visual Lab in conjunction with Bristol Archives, and is supported by the Arts Council of England, and Heritage Lottery Fund. Alone with Empire runs from the 1st - 15th of October 2018.

The full Alone with Empire team is comprised of; Isaac Blease, Alejandro Acin, Edson Burton, Alessandro Altavilla, Shawn Sobers, Giya Makondo-Wills, Nick Diacre, Nicky Sugar, and Jayne Pucknell.

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Men of Africa Imperial War Museum film. (Available only through some browsers)

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The Strand Film Company was formed in 1935 with Paul Rotha as director of productions, and by 1940 - when Alexander Shaw had assumed the role - advertisements stated that the company had already completed 78 films ( DNL, August 1940, 20). Recognised, together with the Realist Film Unit, as the 'leading pre-war independent documentary unit', Strand sought to examine social problems within its sponsored documentaries (Russell, 2007, 209).

Historian Andrew Roberts has described Men of Africa simply as a 'short film extolling British rule' (Roberts, 1987, 200), while John MacKenzie has referred to it as 'one of the most overtly propagandist' of the colonial documentaries, 'made for the Colonial Office to celebrate the work of colonial officials' (MacKenzie, 1999, 227).

More recently, Martin Stollery has suggested that Men of Africa is 'a hybrid between orthodox British documentary perspectives on Empire and Wright's more romantic vision of native cultures'. The film, he suggests, 'lauds the benevolence of British rule... but also celebrates the vibrant sights and sounds of African cultures' (Stollery, 2005, 1494).

Rosaleen Smyth argued that 'the case of Men of Africa demonstrates that it was easier to find money for films in defence of the Empire, to counter criticism of British neglect of the colonies, than it was to find money for films as an aid in imperial "development"'. Smyth suggested that 'one cinematic result' of the growing criticisms of Britain's colonial administration was that the Colonial Marketing Board 'managed to find £4,175 to pay the Strand Film Company' to produce Men of Africa (Smyth, 1979, 449). When the Board ceased to function in 1939, the handling of the film reverted to the Ministry of Information, in consultation with the Colonial Office, who requested a few 'minor alterations' before distribution. Strand was subsequently asked to see if any of the material 'was suitable for making into films for African audiences', and handed material over to the Crown Film Unit in 1945 ( INF 1/200).

In May 1940, Men of Africa appeared alongside the Strand productions, Five Faces of Malaya and Wings over Empire as part of the Empire Film Week at the Tatler Cinema in London. A report in The Times explained that these films go 'soberly to work in pointing out how our administrators work hand in hand with the natives to help them with their own problems and to educate them to the end that they may govern themselves' ( The Times, 21 May 1940, 4). Richard Griffith, an American writing in Documentary News Letter in February 1940, similarly argued that the film 'states that Britain's right to govern colonies is determined by the extent to which she fits them to govern themselves. In articulating this idea, Alexander Shaw's direction has transformed the film from an apology for the British Empire into an inculcation of England's responsibility towards subject populations' ( DNL, February 1940, 3). By now, the film was viewed within the context of the War and 'an expert on colonial administration' wrote in Documentary News Letter in June 1940 that 'personally it left me with a feeling of pride that the principles for which we are fighting this war are so amply illustrated in what was once "darkest" Africa' ( DNL, June 1940, 8).

Men of Africa played in a number of theatres throughout 1940. In August, Strand advertised screenings in cinemas throughout London and in Edinburgh ( DNL, August 1940, 20), while in November it played in Leeds and Manchester ( DNL, November 1940, 8). The film also played to film societies, including those in Dundee and St. Andrews and the London Scientific Film Society ( DNL, November 1940, 9 and May 1940, 14), while even appearing within churches - for example at the Brompton Parish Church in March 1941 ( The Times, 15 May 1941, 7). By 1946, a review in Monthly Film Bulletin noted that the film could be 'loaned free of charge' from the Central Film Library, and suggested that 'it should prove valuable for Youth Clubs, Discussion Groups and Senior Forms in Schools' ( MFB, 13: 145/156, 72).

Men of Africa was also available in America, appearing in 1940 in the private cinema in the British pavilion at the New York World's Fair. In 1944 the British Vice-Consul, Harold Fox, showed the film - alongside Women at War and Message from Malta - as part of a talk to the Philadelphia Motion Pictures Forum ( Chester (PA.) Times, 29 January 1944, 7). After the War, the film was made available for loan in New York ( Social Studies, March 1947, 127) and at libraries, including Lethbridge Public Library in Canada ( Lethbridge Herald, 16 January 1946, 6).

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The Strand Film Company was formed in 1935 with Paul Rotha as director of productions, and by 1940 - when Alexander Shaw had assumed the role - advertisements stated that the company had already completed 78 films ( DNL, August 1940, 20).

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Colonial Africa, 1940’s Huntley Film Archives

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Not socially isolating

Image: RIDE.Jericho Tavern, Oxford, 1994.

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Not socially isolating

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Trashed - Oxford University. 2019
I chose this  image for starting my contribution on this project because it has some signs of community like celebration, traditional outfit and public recognition. Also the elements in the photography have signs that mean different conditions between the people like the fence to separate the groups (it looks very innocent facing the lockdown we have nowadays), how many people we can see each side of that and the difference between the outfits. I guess how this kind of public celebration is important to confirm some kinds of achievements. Is the online connection enough to reach the same effect?

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Birthday Celebration / Portugal/70s/80s

This image is from my grandad´s album, he used to mark a cross on the pictures of the people who have passed away. My dad used to get upset with him thinking that he was somehow ruining the pictures. In contrast, the picture that I’m holding is my older brother’s birthday party.

I’m glad my grandad documented his pictures on his own away.

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Lou Taylor

My father's ashes are in a crematorium on the other side of town. Our family didn't visit his resting place when I was growing up. Last year I visited the crematorium and discovered his ashes were scattered under a cherry tree. To me this was beautiful, as some of the last years of his life were spent in Japan. I have been visiting the crematorium each week, waiting to see the tree blossom. This week, as it comes into full bloom, the cemetery is closed to visitors due to the COVID-19 outbreak. I search my father's archive of photos from Japan and find this image of a cherry tree.

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Social Isolation

The new regime of social distancing and isolating at home can be very lonely, knowing we cannot come and go as we please creates a feeling of longing to be outside all the more.

Having no direct contact with others, aside from the odd interaction 2 metres apart adds to feeling all alone, much like this house in the image.

In direct contrast to seeing the house on the hill as a symbol of loneliness, it has provided sanctuary for me during the social isolation. It's just behind my home, at a much higher point and can be seen from my kitchen window. A place to sit and reflect, taking in the beautiful scenery and sunsets, feeling the warmth of the sunshine and the gentle breeze on my skin reminds me I'm alive.

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Kawaguchi, Shinnin (1736–1811).

Kaishi hen

Heian [Kyoto]: Hakubundō Tanaka Ichibe, Meiwa 9 [1772].

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Mary Oliver Poem "Wild Geese" - typed out on my old manual typewriter. Strangely cathartic the physical bashing on the keys and messy traces it leaves on the paper.

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The following three images and poem are the nascence of my project responding to activating our archives. I could not isolate one - read that as you will - but working with image and text does not lend itself that way either. The title is going to be taken from image 1.  “Why Do I?” (I love the social distancing of the people walking along the straight lines).

I found this sheet music by chance on eBay several years ago and it was waiting for its voice.  This period and lockdown and self isolation provides an opportunity question every aspect of one’s ‘normal’ daily life, and usual responses and really consider the stuff one accumulates along the way, and why.  This is more than a Marie Kondo decluttering, much more reflective.

Light is obviously an essential part of making images and I hope, even if through sadness, we can find shimmers of light to change the way we are in the future and pay greater respect to our planet, our community,  and the pleasure of small things.

Image (2) is taken from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll. 'What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?' says Alice,     This illustration is often present in my mind.  Pelted by cards and cowering in response, to me it represents all the societal stigmas, external social, cultural, peer and family pressures that constantly bombard us. Why do we allow them to continue when they are detrimental to our mental health and prohibit being ourselves or even finding space to investigate what that could be?

Image (3) - my mother - died too young and had become increasingly isolated being a wife and mother.  Loneliness and isolation is even harder to admit to when you are a seemingly happy, long married couple. This tatty professional photograph has an incredible physical presence, and the reverse is full of stories too.

Image (4) - Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. An absolutely brilliant poet.  She reads it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

‘Whoever you are are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination …”

I am also investigating the Black Assize of Oxford 1577 - Gaol fever, bought in by the trial of a “saucy foul mouthed bookseller”

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Le sphere du monde for King Henry II of France.
1549

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Does photography help or hinder memory?

This image sticks in my mind because I recorded it, but is that at the expense of the moments I didn't record? Have I forgotten other, possibly more important, elements of this family holiday because I didn't go to the effort of setting up a tripod and a self-timer? We were only watching TV, albeit in surroundings far grander than at home, but somehow the very act of recording this moment seems to elevate its importance. It’s a question I’ve pondered for some time but not explored in much depth. Going through old work this week I can see how much time and distance clarify your objectivity as a photographer but at the same time blur your memories terribly. I’m not yet sure where I’m going with all this but hope the next few weeks will clarify that too.

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Restriction zone I

"You must not step over the line, you must stay outside of the box"

During an era in which we have began breaking down barriers, removing restrictions and making change socially, politically and culturally; we now find ourselves in a situation in direct contrast to that.

To protect each other and our fragile communities, we have no choice but to follow the strict restrictions of the lockdown regime and social distancing. But to what cost?

This image shows a restriction zone within a retailer in Reading. Each trolley full of supplies has
to be wheeled into the box, marked with hazard tape and the customer must stay outside of the box, at all times.

I have always liked being 'outside of the box' but this may be taking it a bit too literally...

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I randomly find this picture in a printer shop this summer in Casablanca.

It was under a glass counter, while I was paying my photocopies. I begged this woman to let me see the picture closer and hold it.

Behind was written in arabic:
13th of July 1978, Meknes Military base , Morocco

Meknes is the city of my grandparents, where my father grew up,  and where I was born.
I became obsessed with the potential story behind the picture.

I begged again to women if I could bring the picture home or even buy from her. Not understanding why so much fascination, she kindly refused. She said, as someone unknown left it on the floor accidentally few days before, he might come back.

I wrote my number down asking her  to let that person know that they should contact me and tell me about the story of that picture.

Five mysterious and beautiful Moroccan women facing you with  powerful gaze, in  military uniform.

I strangely felt so connected to them, more than simple curiosity. I never received any call about it.

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'STRANDING'

My coinage : 'Strand' was a cigarette brand, launched in1959 with an image of a man on the Embankment smoking one; the slogan was 'You're never alone with a Strand' - but, of course, he *was* alone. The campaign is often cited as a classic eg of advertising failure. The point is that the image actually meant the converse of what it was supposed to. I use 'stranding' to refer to images that, unwittingly, do the same.

Here is a 'stranding image':  if you wanted an image to illustrate one of the most pervasive features of the dominant culture - namely the incorporation of all seemingly dissident actions - you couldn't better this.

In what way is he *not* ‘normal ?: The reversed cap, sunnies, headphones’ - all as much a uniform as open-necked shirt and sports jacket once were. Punk attempted to make a sartorially subversive signifier with ripped clothing; jeans are now sold ready-ripped, to be worn by middle-class girls who would once have worn twinset and pearls.

Of course, it might be thought that this is a hyper-ironic comment on its own conformism. But

somehow, I think not.

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Hijras (Transgenders of India)

This image is part of my project on Hijras of India. These are women trapped in men's body. This image was taken at a place dedicated to Hijras who doing the day work as men but can meet up to dress up as women and feel at home in each others company. They savour the moment and are full of joy at being a woman.

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Candid - 2020 - San Bernardo

This is a raw moment in time. It is full of color,  peace, and imperfections, all elements that speak to me of a Mother and Daughter bond, family ties that can be anything but always real.

My project:
https://padlet.com/ayelenps/646wumshixus

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This photo was taken a couple of years ago at my grandparents’ home in south India. This little girl was accompanying her mother whilst at work (her mother is our cleaner). I’m drawn to this photo for two main reasons. The first is how endearing her accessorising was, and the attention to detail it had: the shape of her bindi, the bangles on each arm, her nail varnish. And the second reason is because it takes me back to my own childhood of filling lazy afternoons with naps, especially with the heat in India. I chose to use monochrome in this photo because I also really liked the way she pushed her blanket aside and slept on the floor, and the positioning of the blanket from her head outwards is almost like a visual ‘flow’ of her dreams, the contrast of which I thought was better represented in monochrome.

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Since 2017, I started looking at my family archives such as pictures and documents with more attention. My grandparents both workers on colonial cruise companies were part of the African Maritime Club, one of the associations of black Africans formed in the centre of Lisbon. I always heard at home informal stories about that era but as a child, I never realized how important all this community of Africans of different countries worked so hard for the PALOP independences and equality in Portugal.

In 2018 I booked my first trip to Angola, I wanted to visit my roots for a long time. I think I went in the perfect time to understand all the transatlantic dynamics and my historic background as Angolan and Portuguese, an Afroeuropean part of the diaspora.

I saw this picture for the first time, in my auntie's house. Back in the days, the house of my maternal grandparents in Angola.

This photo album told me so much.
I realized how much my grandad had to work until getting the possibility to send his family to Portugal. My grandma, based on my auntie, didn't want to move ( I totally understand). So I can see on her face that the decision was made on the future of their children.

In the picture, there is my grandma, my uncles, my auntie and my mom, the youngest. All on the cruise on the way to Portugal, with tickets that my grandad arranged to change their lives.

This image describes where I came from and what kind of subjects I would like to deepen with visual arts. I would like to work on the future with photography and film, connecting with archives and share with society the simplicity and complexity of history and how it is in an anthropological way present in our lives.

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The attached picture has a strong connection with one of the communities in East Oxford where I live.

I was waiting near Manzil Way when I saw this old lady and her grandson.
I thought Oh how good to have someone from the Pakistani Community to join in a protest march but I soon found out she really did not speak any English and was not going to join the protest. Then I suggested a
photo and this is the result. You can see the boy is a bit bored.

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Attached is an image of the adjusted roundel at London Westminster underground. It’s by Larry Archiampong. I’m interested in Art on the Underground, which helps liven up people’s journeys across the city.  The Westminster roundels relate to Achiampong's concept of 'sanko-time', based on African mythologies and their relationship to science fiction.

Roughly translated 'sankofa' means 'to go back for what has been left behind', as well as alluding to using the past to prepare for the future; the wish of being able to go back to an immutable point to make sure that what has been lost is not lost any longer. I rather liked that.

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Trashed - Oxford University, 2019
I chose this image because it has many signs of community like celebration, traditional outfit and public recognition. Also the photographs have signs that mean different conditions like the fence, how many people we can see each side of that and the difference between the outfits.

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This photograph captures the rounding of a circle.

In 2012, my oldest son Jake and his girlfriend Roxy moved to Shanghai.

When I was a boy in the
1960s my family shared a postcode. Jake’s emigration left us in different continents, in different time
zones.

In 2013 Jake and Roxy got married. Over the next three years Roxy gave birth to my grandchildren,
April and Esmay. While we could just about afford for me to visit once a year, my youngest kids, Lando and Mimi, had only ever seen their nieces in the photos I took while visiting or coming in and out of shot during Skype calls. They’d never had a hug, played games or shared a story.

In 2018 we decided this was ridiculous, put some flights our credit cards and went out for a long
overdue visit. This picture captures the coming together of four people I love unconditionally.

The picture shouldn’t be a keeper. Objectively speaking it isn’t a great photograph. It’s a family album
shot. The focus is off, the shutter speed was too slow, the camera wasn’t set up right for the lighting.
Yet, subjectively, this photograph has a blend of composition and moment in time that makes it special to me. It captures the relationship that quickly grew between the four of them. I like the expressions, the upward arc of faces, the shared focus on the book, the movement as the youngest
tries to get closer, the sense of connection. It captures a closeness that grew as if by magic.

Since the photo was taken Jake and his family have returned from China, leaving almost as first world
refugees, quickly packing cases and selected possessions and getting one of the last flights out before the Coronavirus crackdown made this impossible. The virus had left them feeling like outsiders in their adopted home and the girls isolated from their friends when schools shut and people left the city or locked their doors. It was sad way to leave a place they’d loved and that had been such an
important part of their story.

Now they’re in England we will have far more time together as a family, yet this will remain the time when my kids and grandchildren first met, when real connections were made. Photographs have the power to capture moments, to tell stories, to show connections. In the future this photograph will become part of our story, in the same way as the photographs of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents keep alive their connection to us.

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'A stones throw away from the noise and crowds of citylife, the mystery of this Soho side street caught my attention. It is within such a busy area, but yet so quiet, a welcome break from the crowds, and a beautiful yet mysterious view of the street beyond. The neon lighting caught my eye to begin with, setting off the street art, which then leads the eye to beyond the alleyway. It stirred many questions and much wonder within me; Where does it go? Why is it so quiet? What is it's purpose?'

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Dad
This is an image of my father just before he emigrated to australia with his young family. My dad was a deep soul with an outer crust that montazuma’s revenge couldnt crack. I knew him as my dad but he was so much more. He was the rock in my life that never faltered and always had a good word to say about everyone and you could always count on to help to reach your dreams.

(In australia we class montazuma’s revenge as an unmovable force...lol but looking it up here its something that is a moveable force....I choose the former for my comments)

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I am very interested in what the firstborn of a new generation means to a family and have been
for a long time interested in exploring that in an art project. Babies are seen as a new opportunity
to make things right, a way to carry the family name and its stories, and always as a source of
hope. This is even truer to grandparents that, with death on their doorstep, inevitably reflect on
their own life meaning.

My family as an example
I identify as Amorim, which is one of my surnames but not my last one, which should have been
the one I used (Portuguese have several surnames), I, e.g. have 4).
This because Amorim , through storytelling, had always a special importance to me and my
brother. It from my mother’s father (my grandfather) - he was one of 5 illegitimate children from
the relationship between my great-grandmother, an illiterate farmer worker, and the son of the
landowner. Despite never marrying and, apparently, have a relationship with the woman that
gave him five children, this man, my great-grandfather, never assumed their paternity. As a
result, the babies were registered with only their mother&#39;s surnames in different combinations.
My grandfather was the only one given Amorim as last surname. When his mother died of
tuberculosis (the disease of the poor), he was 11 and, like was usual in those days the brothers
were separated and sent to work. My grandfather was sent to work in a grocery shop in Lisbon.
He slept on the shop floor and stood on a box to reach the counter and the customers. But he was
intelligent, charming and had vision and when the owner retired, he took over the grocery. From
that, he went to launch other businesses and buy several properties. He understood the power of education despite being illiterate - he was an autodidact that learned to read and write only in his
40s so be able to have a driver&#39;s license - and pushed my mother to have a (medical) degree. He
understood the power of social mobility. My mother was an activist, an underground freedom
fighter during fascism in Portugal, later an MP and has always been involved in the women&#39;s
rights movements. Me and my brother carried other fights. I am the first one in the whole
(extended) family to have a DPhil (and from Oxford). Our family story, represented in the
surname Amorim, has always meant strength and the importance of always be there for each
other.

However, in my country an individual's last surname - the one that is passed to his/her children-
always comes from his/her father. The mother last name will be the child’s the surname before
the last. This means that generations with only girls (like my mother, who was an only child)
pass their surname to their children but not to their grandchildren.
My photo is from my nephew, David, the first of our next generation. With him my brother
chose to subvert the rules and gave him as last surname Amorim. This means that not only this
new generation will continue carrying my grandfather inheritance of strength and love, but also
since he is a boy that this surname name will be passed to his children.

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It communicates to me a raw moment in time. It is full of color, peace, and imperfections, all elements that speak to me of a Mother and Daughter bond, family ties that can be anything but always real.

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Migrant Mothers
This is a family photo taken in late 1950s. It depicts three generations of women: my great-grandmother (dressed in black) born in the southern region of Silesia, my grandmother, born in the German city of Hamburg, standing here together with her husband and three children, the youngest of whom is my mother, born in northern Polish town of Gdynia where this picture was taken, where the vicinity of the sea shaped my thinking about the world and from where I departed for the UK in 2004.

I am a mother myself now. Together with my husband Olly who is half English, half Italian, we are raising two girls (and a third one on its way) in two languages, negotiating parental standards, cultural backgrounds, exchanging childhood memories, telling our children the stories of hot summers spent in Italy or of daily life under communism. I’m curious to see how all this will form their sense of identity. Who will they feel they are?

I also often go back to my own family history, to those generations of migrant mothers and wonder how their life choices and experiences made them redefine their sense of belonging and what strategies they used to establish homes in new places and communities. Am I like them?

This photo is a starting point for me to think more broadly about the experience of being a migrant mother. Any migration is a dialogue between the past and the present, one culture and another, memories and changed circumstances, native and acquired languages. Starting with this image I’d like to create a collage which will reflect these conversations, often full of conflicting emotions and unexpected cultural fusions. I’d like to work with other migrant women and through this exchange create similar compositions of their own experiences, of what they have left behind and what they have gained. I'm keen to explore how migration influences motherhood and articulate through photographs and stories what it has meant for me.

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Tayo Jones

Gone but not forgotten: Fopp. (2020)

This is Fopp. It was a retail store that sold Films, Music and Books. As a film fan, I went to Fopp several times and purchased a few films. I would have bought books and a CD, but due to the fact that more people shop online, Fopp was forced to close down Last year. I was heartbroken, but I will never forget.

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Connections.
I took this photo of my mum at her 80th birthday party in January 2018. She is talking to my son Jake, her oldest grandson, in Shanghai.

She is asking him about his daughter and seeing her live onscreen for the first time. She has still not been able to meet her, previously because he was in China and now he's home because of CV-19.

I love the tenderness with which she is cradling the phone, as if it was a new born child or an wounded bird.

https://padlet.com/kjburrell1/vgzhrxonnr3y

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Gone but not forgotten: Boswells( 2020)

From 1738 to 2020, Boswells has been a stable of the Oxford retail scene for decades. Now it is gone. Heartbreaking.

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Francesco Pennacchio   -  Unlike Flowers, she won't come back with Spring

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Francesco Pennacchio   -  Unlike Flowers, she won't come back with Spring

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My mother died on November 18, 1991. I was two.

March 1992, spring. I am in the garden with my father, taking care of the newly come blossoms. My father explains me how flowers and plants come back to life once the winter is passed. I ask him whether Mom would have come back again after the winter, too.

He explained me, close to tears, that that was not the case for human beings.

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Keywords

Community - Dialogue - Virus - Illness - Health - Isolation - Social Distance - Touch - Closeness - Sharing - Possession - Survival - Money - World - Contact - Separation - Distance - Global - Gathering - Walk - Family - Online - Death - Life

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Mishka Henner, Photographers (2012)

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Photographers, 2012 Single-channel video with audio (10:30 mins) In collaboration with David Oates

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Link to last year's Activating our Archives Padlet.