Tate Britain
23 May, 2009
Listen to the conference on iTunes U/Tate IQ!
Keynote: Marketa Luskacova + Panel 1: Mapping Landscapes
Panel 2: Human Landscapes
Panel 3: Mapping Landscapes
Keynote: Markéta Luskačová
Listen: Keynote: Marketa Luskacova + Panel 1: Mapping Landscapes
Luskačová’s photographic work in Spitalfields, London has spanned more than thirty years. In this talk, she will focus on her work on the rapidly changing Brick Lane, Sclater Street and Cheshire Street Sunday markets. This work chronicles the remarkable vivacity, spirit and fortitude of the traders and their customers who come to these markets with the regularity of pilgrims to take part in the great act of recycling goods. Recording faces of East End people and their struggle for everyday survival in the city, Luskačová’s photographs speak of their stories, as well as her own.
Panel 1: Mapping Landscapes
Discussant: Paul Goodwin, Tate Britain
Listen: Keynote: Marketa Luskacova + Panel 1: Mapping Landscapes
Paul Halliday, Goldsmiths, University of London
Geographies of Nowhere
My paper will explore the relationship between the concept of ‘somewhere-ness’ and its apparent binary opposite of ‘nowhere-ness’. The paper begins with a critical examination of some of the core precepts held as disciplinary truths within geography, anthropology, sociology and other social science disciplines concerned with the study of place, space and related epistemologies. Alice in Wonderland provides a suitable theoretical starting point to this talk as the character of Alice wanders through a geographic terrain characterized by mutability and instability, encountering mythic characters that occupy a psychological hinterland that defies logic and refuses to conform to a traditional cartography of fairytale-land. This enduring children’s book, rich in metaphors and symbolism, provides an intellectual touchstone for photographic artists concerned with space and surrealism. The notion of nowhere-ness will be explored through an on-going photographic project based on global cities, concerned less with the geographic particular, and more with temporal, spatial and semiotic slippage.
Susan Trangmar, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
A Play in Time
I will be discussing and presenting an extract from A Play in Time, a double screen video installation recently made in St Anne’s Well Gardens in Hove and commissioned by Photoworks UK and Brighton and Hove City Council. The main issues I will be addressing concern the park as a public space of recreation; the historical resonance of site; the significance of the nondescript; visibility, the wandering gaze and observation; return over time as a methodological principle; the trajectory of vision through double screen editing and the video itself as ‘meeting place’ of incidentals. A Play in Time makes an implicit plea for the right to engage in the pleasure of the gaze in public and resists the constrictions of the right to visually record in urban space, constrictions which come with the increasing privatisation of public space and accompanying technologies of surveillance.
Caroline Knowles, Goldsmiths, University of London
Urban Landscapes of Migration
Drawing on recent research in Hong Kong in collaboration with photographer Douglas Harper, this paper examines the journeys that converge on this urban landscape from China, from the Philippines, from the UK and through the circuits drawn by key global corporations. Through these multiple mobilities and forces in city composition, critical questions are posed about the production of urban landscape and what it means to be a migrant.
Panel 2: Human Landscapes
Discussant: Peter Coles, Goldsmiths, University of London
Listen: Panel 2: Human Landscapes
Davide Deriu, University of Westminster
Picturing a City’s Soul: Photographs and Memories in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul
In his non-fiction book Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk excavates his own past to explore the complex blend of Eastern and Western cultures that constitute his native city. Personal recollections and critical reflections on the city’s history, myths, and images are woven together into a thick narrative tapestry interspersed with black-and-white photographs – many of which were taken by the renowned photographer Ara Güler. With echoes of his labyrinthine novel The Black Book (1990), Pamuk depicts an urban landscape in which people and places are equally pervaded by a distinct sense of melancholy (hüzün), which is repeatedly evoked with reference to the city’s atmospheric conditions. The paper explores the role of photographs in conveying the texture of this elemental city, whose soul is, for Pamuk, in black and white. It suggests that urban photographs function like ‘pockets of memory’ wherein the disappearing aura of Istanbul is wilfully preserved. In conclusion, a comparison with the work of photographer and filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan will raise wider questions as to how contemporary urban photography reflects the changing identity of this metropolis.
Susan Schwartzenberg
Space, Place and Existence
Human life is situated in time and space with much of a person’s life expressed within their surrounding environment. This extended or embodied landscape is part physical, part cognitive and part archival. This presentation will discuss the ways in which mind, memory and history are infused/ networked within the physical objects and environments of the everyday landscape. Finding tactics to uncover this web of relationships also suggests forms of representation where the resulting narrative creates its own set of spatial relationships. The talk will use as case study Schwarztenberg’s documentary project and book recently published by University of Washington Press, Becoming Citizens, Family Life and the Politics of Disability.
Gabrielle Bendiner–Viani, the New School & Goldsmiths, University of London
Guided Tours: The Layered Dynamics of Self, Place and Image in Two American Neighbourhoods
This work complicates our understanding of the creation, knowledge and experience of everyday experience in two heterogeneous neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, New York and Oakland, California. Challenging conceptions of the role of the expressive, the individual, and the visual in research, the work explores how a combination of embodied walking and expressive representational photographic strategies—my “guided tours” method—can show us new ways of knowing about the physical and phenomenal everyday world. The evocative and embodied power of being physically in place—through walks or drives—is juxtaposed with a process of photographic production and reflection, utilizing photography’s evocative relationship to the real as a prompt for storytelling. From this unique method, this work develops a typology of “layered dynamics” to understand how everydayness is continually created through processes of knowing, negotiating and experiencing, as places and lives are woven together.
Panel 3: Changing Landscapes
Discussant: Alison Rooke, Goldsmiths, University of London
Listen: Panel 3: Mapping Landscapes
Janet Delaney, University of California, Berkeley
Form Follows Finance: The South of Market Project
Janet Delaney will look at the way the camera creates history in a split second. She will highlight her documentary project, Form Follows Finance, A Survey of the South of Market District, San Francisco. This project addresses the impact of gentrification in the early 1980’s as a new convention centre promised to transform a working class neighbourhood of San Francisco. Delaney will also discuss the work of her UC Berkeley students who have documented a distressed downtown Berkeley as a way to understand how cities work and how they transform over time.
Tiffany Fairey, PhotoVoice
New Londoners: Separated young refugees frame their views on London
New Londoners: Reflections on Home is a book of photo essays on London by young refugees who have been making the city their home. The book is the culmination of a PhotoVoice project that aims to support young refugees to settle and integrate into the UK. Through the project, 15 New Londoners were mentored by 15 London photographers to create personalised photo stories about their views and experiences of the city. This talk will present some of the work, discuss the project’s conceptual purpose and the participatory process it entailed. It will reflect on ethical tensions underlying participatory photography work and touch on some of the debates and learning that came out of the project.
Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London
London’s Finished?: Developing an Inventory of Multicultural Life
This paper seeks to explore issues of racism and belonging in everyday life through competing claims about the rhythms of life in contemporary London. While multiculturalism is routinely pronounced dead, encounters in and through difference is a banal fact of everyday life. How can this be? What modes of attention may artists, photographers, and even sociologists, train to better understand the paradoxical combinations of encounter and division within the city? Taking a London market as the social stage to explore these questions, the presentation will focus on the tale of two fishmongers. A biography of objects, commerce and people is used to suggest that in order to really understand the challenges of the present it is necessary to first develop an inventory of multicultural life that is equally attentive to the place of racism within it.