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Some images here that echo the achive work we looked at - and some that are just Mazzini photographs - and that 70-80% v 13% -  15% figure is salutary in light to the Oxford Photo Women and Photography theme.

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The Female in Focus award from 1854 Media and the British Journal of Photographyaddresses the gender imbalance in photography. Globally, 70-80% of photography students are women, yet they account for only 13-15% of professional photographers. This selection of work demonstrates a tapestry of women's experiences from around the world

An exhibition at Green Space Miami as part of the inaugural WOPHA Congress in Miami, US, from 18 November 2021 to 18 January 2022, sponsored by MPB

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Female in Focus photography awards 2021 - in pictures

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The Female in Focus award from 1854 Media and the British Journal of Photographyaddresses the gender imbalance in photography. Globally, 70-80% of photography students are women, yet they account for only 13-15% of professional photographers.

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Kevin Burrell - a different use of archive

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Kevin Burrell - a different use of archive

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The Australian singer, Emily Barker, who often plays in Oxford , has worked with a video artist to take images from cine film of her grandparents wedding in Rotterdam in the 1950's as a video for her new song.
Her grandmother and her aunt had a double wedding before her parents emigrated to Melbourne.
When his wife died her grandfather grieved by watching this film over and over again and telling anyone present to stories about the family.

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Emily Barker - Dinosaur Bones (Official Music video)

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Dear all,
I've enjoyed and learned a lot from the feedback I've received and from your projects.

Sunil: Your engagement with the online participation was amazing. I really appreciate it.

Thanks all and have a nice afternoon today in the Museum!

Be well + kind regards ,
Martin

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From the initial reject file - with a severe crop....

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In case you've not seen this - I got this in a Magnum newsletter today. Fascinating and in many ways related to issues about archives and authenticity - with some great photos into the bargain.

The Book of Veles: How Jonas Bendiksen Hoodwinked the Photography Industry | Magnum Photos

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In this interview, Jonas Bendiksen tells the intricate story behind the creation of his most recent publication, The Book of Veles, a project whose unusual trajectory upon release was as bizarre as the subject matter that initially inspired it.
Can you tell us about why you initially became fascinated with the modern town of Veles in North Macedonia?
Throughout the Trump era, I was boiling with frustration over all the lies and misinformation in the media. I was reading about the Russian hacking, the role of Facebook and Twitter, "alternative facts", and how the algorithms worked. At some point I saw a mention that Veles had become this unlikely hub of misinformation, spewing out fake news during the Trump election in 2016. When people realized that hundreds of fake news websites originated there, lots of big news organizations went there to report. Even Obama mentioned the town. I was fascinated by the idea that teenagers in far-off North Macedonia suddenly played a role in the American political landscape. Their intentions were totally apolitical: these guys just needed to earn some cash, in a town with lots of youth unemployment. They became information hackers because they found a creative way to earn money, more than any wish to create havoc in the USA.

The way we now produce, spread and consume information has changed so much in the last 15 years, and this was a terrifying example of that. So I started digging, and found all these other strange layers to the story.

But today, most historians and linguists conclude that the entire Book of Veles was a forgery by Izenbek and Mirolyubov.

Later I discovered that The Book of Veles was translated to English in 1973, by a guy at Ohio State University. The translator himself didn't realize The Book of Veles was a fake, so he peppered it with all sorts of footnotes about the work's historical importance. Once I got into all this, all my engines started powering up! The myriad layers of chaos and misinformation, all centered around either the God Veles or the town Veles - things that weren't really related, but still so serendipitously interlinked by name. Now it became absolutely irresistible to try to play around with. What was real and what was fake here? All sorts of people believed different versions of it.

Like with my other projects, photography is always just a tool or excuse for me to dive headfirst into whatever fascinates me at any given time. Here was my chance to grapple with this whole question of where journalism, manipulations, deep fakes, fake news and photography merge - and maybe try to look down the event horizon a bit and imagine where it all might be headed.
How do you investigate, and employ, disinformation through your book?
In the past, digitally manipulated imagery has normally used photographs as its basis - an advanced form of cut-and-paste; you would take one bit of a photograph and cleverly insert it into another. But today, new all-digital technologies are about to wash over us like a tsunami. In a few years' time, producing deep-fake videos will be easily done on your mobile. AI-generated portraits (like on thispersondoesnotexist.com) are getting more and more convincing every month, and are already being actively employed commercially. There are Instagram influencers for kids that are just 3D avatars, each one customized to appeal to its target audience. These are a different breed of manipulated imagery because they bypass the camera itself - everything is just generated by the computer chip.

I started to ask myself the question - how long will it take before we start seeing "documentary photojournalism" that has no other basis in reality than the photographer's fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card? Will we be able to tell the difference? How hard is it to do? How skilled will our own community of photographers and editors be in sniffing out what are deep fakes and what is real?

I was so frightened by what the answers would be that I decided to try to do this myself.

The whole project is really me trying to grapple with the questions of what these new technologies mean, and how easy it is to put them to "evil" use. What does this mean for our understanding of photography as documentation of anything? How easy is it to get people to sing along to a fake tune?

The Book of Veles project became my own little visual Turing test.

I made two field trips to Veles. In a stroke of luck, the last was just a week before all of Europe suddenly shut down because of Covid. So I was really fortunate to have finished the field work. It meant that I ended up with the most perfect project to do as the Coronavirus raged throughout the world, and I didn't have any other assignments: I basically had a year to sit at my computer, playing with my 3D avatars and fake news scenes. As I dug deeper into it, I added more layers.

Just as digitally generated imagery is developing rapidly, so is AI-generation of text. I found a free trainable system for creating text, called GPT-2, that is trained on millions of real websites. These are systems that are typically used when companies need an automated customer service bot. The thing is you can train the systems further, to match your tone of voice and way of expressing yourself. If you feed the AI with the collected works of Shakespeare, it will spit out quite convincing Shakespeare verse. If you feed it with the King James Bible, it spits out more holy bible scripture.

To get the text for my book, I fed this system with every article that was reported by English-language media about the fake news industry in Veles, and then had the artificial intelligence write the big 5000-word essay in my book. I didn't write a single word of it. I just cut and pasted various sequences it invented together so that it had a logical flow.

Then I took all the real quotes from people who had been involved in the fake news production and fed it into the AI, which then produced new statements. That is where all the quotes in the book are from: They are fake, invented by computer, but based on things real interview subjects said.

Creatively it was a bit of a juggernaut. I found one English copy of the translated ancient Book of Veles scripture. But I felt this ancient (forgery of a) text didn't relate enough to the rest of my material. So naturally I fed the whole ancient Book of Veles into the artificial intelligence, and voilà, I had infinite amounts of computer-invented "ancient scripture" I could supplement it with.

In sum, it became a fake news story about fake news producers. The story of Veles being a fake news hub is real. The story of the Book of Veles' discovery and forgery is real. But all the actual content is fake. The only thing that is left unmanipulated are the quotes from the Veles fake news websites themselves - which needless to say are themselves mostly ridiculous gibberish.
Do you feel that machine learning, and technology more broadly, has had an overall helpful effect on society's ability to engage with information?
I am very doubtful of whether all this technology and information is making us any smarter or wiser. I mean, just look around the world, how easily everyone is manipulated either this or that direction. There is just too much information, it is too easy to spread it everywhere, and everyone gets to pick and choose which small fragment of it they want to relate to. Our powers of analysis are not getting better, and we aren't adept at sorting good data from bad. Yes, social media and Youtube are super duper if I need tips on how to change the diesel filter on my boat's engine. But for the wider issues, I am pessimistic. This project was for me a sort of test of where things are headed.

Several magazines have wanted to run the piece, and I have made up excuses why they can't have it, as publishing it in a broadly-read magazine would be one step to far, ethically. I felt it was ok to prank my own photographic community, but not the wider world.

I have gotten special kicks out of all the positive feedback I've gotten in social media about the essay in the book. Lots of people have commented what an interesting and illuminating text I wrote. Since it was written entirely by artificial intelligence, I was curious if it would pass. This shows that within a short amount of time, we will be surrounded by lots of convincing articles written by bots, and most people won't be able to tell the difference.
Do you have a message you would say to the real-life residents of Veles, now that you have created this work?
Yes, I hope they are not too offended that I used what happened in their town as a springboard for my machinations. But what exactly are the ethical implication of my work for the residents of Veles, considering that all the people in my story are digital avatars? What obligations do I have towards people I didn't actually photograph? It's a tricky question that will be relevant in the years to come.

I hope on balance the people of Veles see it as fair play: A bunch of their youngsters made up lots of ridiculous fiction about a far-away place, the USA, and benefited from that. And I came from a far-away place and made up some fiction in return about them, but based on a true story. I intended no harm, and I found Veles a very nice and friendly place. I didn't actually meet a single person who was connected to the fake news industry, nor did I try. Anything I know about the fake news business in Veles is second-hand through the media.

I have planned all along for the truth about my project to get out, so it was never meant to be a lasting lie. The book is full of breadcrumbs that were meant to lead to the cat getting out of the bag soon enough.

I kind of went overboard sometimes, which was a lot of fun. According to the legends the ancient god Veles was a shapeshifter who took the form of a bear. So in the book, I put in a bunch of pictures of 3D bears wandering around the outskirts of town, so that the god Veles could be seen in the story. I got to be a National Geographic wildlife photographer without having to wait for weeks in the bushes.
But you submitted the work to Visa pour l'Image, the biggest festival of photojournalism, in Perpignan, France?
I was surprised that none of my photo colleagues questioned anything about the book. So I needed to test if these doctored images really can pass through the most discerning filters. I sent both the entire image series and the full resolution PDF of the book itself to the Visa pour l'Image festival. When they came back to me and offered me an evening screening on the festival program, I felt very conflicted. I felt terrible because I was not being honest with them. On the other hand, I felt going through with this could be very important for photojournalism and our industry.

If computer-generated fake news pictures are accepted by the curators who have to pick the highlights of all the year's best photojournalism, it shows that the whole industry is quite vulnerable.

The big tech companies regularly recruit top-level hackers, even criminal ones, to try to break into their systems. They are called penetration testers. They are paid top dollar to hack as much as they can and search for weaknesses in company's system architecture, so that they can go fix the loopholes and protect themselves against being taken advantage of. I guess I see what I did as a similar service for documentary photography and photojournalism, just on a volunteer basis.

I felt that while I couldn't publish in mainstream media channels, having it screened at an industry festival was legitimate. Even so, I do want to publicly apologize to Jean-François Leroy and the good people of the Visa festival. They are doing an important job - even if it turns out they, like all of us, need to be more on the alert for fake news.
How closely did you plan the reveal of the truth behind the project?
When I released the book in April, I thought someone would challenge it within a few weeks. When that never happened, I decided to help people along by stirring their suspicions.

Fake news generally spreads through social media, so I figured I needed to orchestrate an attack on myself and The Book of Veles there. I went online and bought a pre-aged fake Facebook profile. Her name was "Chloe Miskin" and cost about $40. The guys I bought her from claim that her profile pictures are AI-generated. I have no idea if that is true. You just pay the money, and you get whomever you get.

I managed her infiltration into our photographic community. Within weeks, she was friends with over 600 photo editors, photographers, curators and other industry people.

As soon as the Perpignan screening was over, I wanted to bring out the truth as soon as possible. Within 24 hours, I let fake Chloe loose on Facebook with grave accusations that I was paying my subjects to appear in the pictures (which was of course true, in the sense that I had bought the 3D avatar base models). My aim was to draw people in to have a closer look. I thought everything would be over in a matter of hours. Much to my surprise, nobody took the bait, and they even started defending my alleged conduct.

I realized I was in the wrong place and had to quickly establish some new fake trolling profiles on Twitter.

Twitter-Chloe started tweeting similar accusations about how I paid for subjects. After some initial outrage, Benjamin Chesterton, aka Duckrabbit, found a chink in my armor, and spotted that one of the fake account's profile pictures was an outtake of a woman that actually appears in my book, wearing the same clothes.

I was greatly relieved to have arrived at this point. And I want to say well done to Duckrabbit; I thank you for helping extract me from all my lies, and letting me go back to life as an honest citizen! I will send a signed book.
It might be quite instinctive that the reading that people take from the work is one of skepticism. In actual fact, the project arises from your curiosity and enthusiasm for discussing the questions that you believe are important around photography today. What's been the most exciting and hopeful thing you have learnt from the whole process?
My hypothesis all along was that if one averagely nerdy freelance photographer can put this together in his basement office, then we're all in for a heck of a ride. So I guess the optimistic perspective would be that we are headed into a minefield, and it is good to have a bunch of warning signs posted up before we step into it.

-

Signed copies of the The Book of Veles are available from the Magnum Shop here.

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The Book of Veles: How Jonas Bendiksen Hoodwinked the Photography Industry | Magnum Photos Magnum Photos

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In this interview, Jonas Bendiksen tells the intricate story behind the creation of his most recent publication, The Book of Veles, a project whose unusual trajectory upon release was as bizarre as the subject matter that initially inspired it. Can you tell us about why you initially became fascinated with the modern town of Veles in North Macedonia?

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Fusion

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an image taken on film of fusion arts, from Saturdays session!!

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Hello all, great session yesterday, I would really like to be connected on instagram with the group, please could you post here if you are happy to share or other social media platform?
I have two: @amandadenny_photography (main one)
and
@picture_conversations
Thanks all

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Still life fairy princess and broken dreams

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Still printing in war time, amazing that these books even made it out of the block in 1941 as a new venture

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Using a photo from the reject pile to add shape and contrast

I'll share a  few more examples here as I play with the images. https://padlet.com/kjburrell1/4zpzpvp5chylg5o1

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I'm  finding the way I'm blending the pictures a bit too repetitive and am exploring adding some different elements. I want these images to suggest time passed as well as a moment in time.

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<The Joint Agenda 2021 Project - Protests over responses to Pandemic, Society and Post Corona>

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Hi, I am Seeun. I completed new Sign Language Object, which is related to Protest series!

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Essay on nostalgia by Svetlana Boym,
this was really interesting to read when looking at my grandparents archive images and how I could use them within my project.

'a cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface'

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The word "nostalgia" comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos ("return home") and ἄλγος, álgos ("longing"). I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own phantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images-of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.

In spite of its Greek roots, the word "nostalgia" did not originate in ancient Greece. "Nostalgia" is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. 1 (Hofer also suggested monomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms; luckily, the latter failed to enter common parlance.) It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the 17th century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps would take care of nostalgic symptoms. By the end of the 18th century, doctors discovered that a return home did not always cure the nostalgics-sometimes it killed them (especially when patriotic doctors misdiagnosed tuberculosis as nostalgia). Just as today genetic researchers hope to identify genes coding for medical conditions, social behavior, and even sexual orientation, so the doctors in the 18th and 19th centuries looked for a single cause, for one "pathological bone." Yet they failed to find the locus of nostalgia in their patient's mind or body. One doctor claimed that nostalgia was a "hypochondria of the heart," which thrives on its symptoms. From a treatable sickness, nostalgia turned into an incurable disease. A provincial ailment, a maladie du pays, turned into a disease of the modern age, a mal du siècle.

The nostalgia that interests me here is not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion. Hence I will make three crucial points. First, nostalgia in my diagnosis is not "antimodern." It is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but the result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into "local" and "universal" possible.

Secondly, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. Hence the "past of nostalgia," to paraphrase Faulkner, is not "even the past." It could merely be another time, or slower time. Time out of time, not encumbered by appointment books.

Thirdly, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future. Considering the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales. Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory. While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space.

In fact, there is a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia. It can be called "off-modern." The adverb "off" confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore side-shadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narrative of 20th‑century history. Off-modernism offered a critique of both the modern fascination with newness, and the no less modern reinvention of tradition. In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together.

Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair "longing" with a particular "belonging"-the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and a unique and pure homeland-we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Álgos (longing) is what we share, yet nóstos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition.

Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution, and the recent "velvet" revolutions in Eastern Europe were accompanied by political and cultural manifestations of longing. In France it is not only the ancient régime that produced revolution, but in some respect the revolution produced the ancien régime, giving it a shape, a sense of closure, and a gilded aura. Similarly, the revolutionary epoch of perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produced an image of the last Soviet decades as the time of stagnation or, alternatively, as a Soviet Golden Age of stability, national strength, and "normalcy." Yet the nostalgia that I explore here is not always for the ancient régime, stable superpower, or the fallen empire, but also for the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete. The history of nostalgia might allow us to look back at modern history as a search not only for newness and technological progress, but also for unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads.

The most common currency of the globalism exported all over the world is money and popular culture. Nostalgia too is a feature of global culture, but it demands a different currency. After all, the key words defining globalism-"progress," "modernity," and "virtual reality"-were invented by poets and philosophers: "progress" was coined by Immanuel Kant; the noun "modernity" is a creation of Charles Baudelaire; and "virtual reality" was first imagined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates. Only in Bergson's definition, "virtual reality" referred to planes of consciousness, potential dimensions of time and creativity that are distinctly and inimitably human. As far as nostalgia is concerned, having failed to uncover its exact locus, 18th‑century doctors recommended seeking help from poets and philosophers. Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, trespassing across the boundaries between disciplines and national territories. So one has to face it in order not to become its next victim-or the next victimizer.

Instead of a magic cure for nostalgia, I will offer a tentative typology and distinguish between two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming-wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.

Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots-the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholies. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection.

The 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. The optimistic belief in the future has become outmoded while nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary. 2 Contrary to what the great actress Simone Signore-who entitled her autobiography Nostalgia Is Not What It Used to Be-thought, the structure of nostalgia is in many respects what it used to be, in spite of changing fashions and advances in digital technology. In the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence. Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, and a cure. It is up to us to take responsibility of our nostalgia and not let others "prefabricate" it for us. The prepackaged "usable past" may be of no use to us if we want to cocreate our future. Perhaps dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should not come to life. Sometimes it is preferable (at least in the view of this nostalgic author) to leave dreams alone, let them be no more and no less than dreams, not guidelines for the future﻿. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one's homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home-occasionally at the same time.

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I wonder if this is too different and may need to sit in a different part of the sequence if at all.

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Experimenting with an old tatty Saturday book cover, using it to reframe another cover image. An old fashioned screen for modesty.  She is a mermaid on a rock.

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The downcast gaze, how much editing can change our perspective. 1950s Glamour. 

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An experiment for my entrance into the work, I am not competent at photoshop, and forgot to add in Louise Gluck's name at the end of the Matins poem when I typed it but it is a start.  Matins as an early call with its own histories, I am also connected to.  Layers and layers of meanings.

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Sunil Shah: Akram Zaatari in conversation 

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Sunil Shah: Akram Zaatari in conversation 

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Akram Zaatari’s talk at New Art Exchange in Nottingham in 2018, in conversation with Anthony Downey. See if you spot someone familiar during the Q and A.

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Akram Zaatari in conversation Dr Anthony Downey

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Sunil Shah: Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing exhibition review.

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Sunil Shah: Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing exhibition review.

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Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing, From Mail Art to Instagram (Published 2019)

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A new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shows that image sharing is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

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Sunil Shah: The Body and the Archive, Allan Sekula 1986.

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Sunil Shah: The Body and the Archive, Allan Sekula 1986.

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Background reading, not essential to read as it is a long text but we will be covering some of the ideas in the essay next week.

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What is Conceptual Photography. Broomberg and Chanarin.

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What is Conceptual Photography? (part 3)

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Mishka Henner

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I'm Not the Only One, 2015 Single-channel video with audio (4:34 mins) Sources Abbie Leigh StarMakerApp4 Tamás...

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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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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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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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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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Alone with Empire Project

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An independent organization based in Bristol (UK), with an artistic orientation towards the social using photography, film and visual archives. Focussing on the development of a regular programme of collaborative projects, situations, workshops, actions and events to encourage a critical discussion about the role and use of images in today's world.

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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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Colonial Africa, 1940’s Huntley Film Archives

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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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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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Sunil Shah - Arturo Soto, A Certain Logic of Expectations

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Sunil Shah - Arturo Soto, A Certain Logic of Expectations

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A Certain Logic of Expectations — Arturo Soto (eriskayconnection.com)

Mentioned on Saturday, Arturo was based in Oxford recently and this is a body of work he published for his post-doc degree at Ruskin.

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A photo-text book presenting a counter-narrative of the British city of Oxford that resists the visual imperatives of its ancient university.

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Abandoned book found in the street last Sunday!