Welcome To Flight School

As Rakim once said, it’s been a long time…

And in the interval since I last wrote this blog, one of the things that’s most occupied my thoughts is the concept of time itself.

Yep, I’m starting with an easy topic today!

Toward the end of last year I was lucky enough to participate in the PILOT III programme run by Autograph. It was a genuinely transformative experience, surrounded by incredibly inspiring practitioners and supported by expert facilitators. During the process, I was challenged to reconsider the work I’ve been making by the idea that time is in fact circular, not linear.

Being introduced to this idea sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole that’s still occupying most of my creative thoughts many months later. Ever since being captivated by the adventures of Marty McFly as a kid, the idea of time travel has always fascinated and perplexed me.

If I could travel back to the past or way into the future, which would I choose first*? Which would you choose? I’m sure many of you have asked yourselves this question at some point.

But what if the future and the past were instead all accessible from the present, existing in the same temporal plane, knowable by simply expanding your awareness beyond the narrow limitations of linear time and the oppressive inevitability of never reaching your future?

Once I started exploring these ideas, I realised how culturally-dependent our notions of time are, and how in fact there are numerous concepts of time that happily co-existed for many ages before our current paradigm became predominant.

“How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”

— Christina Sharpe

Reflecting on these ideas has changed the way I’ve approached the work I’ve been doing with my childhood images and how I’m thinking about the story I’m telling. It’s really interesting to reconsider the wistfulness I mentioned in my last post through the lens of a different appreciation of the passage of time and an alternative view of the connection between my past, present and future selves, and so the work has taken another turn while I continue to wrangle these ideas like someone trying to contain a flock of unruly hens on a treadmill.

I challenge you to Google ‘circular time’, read the first few articles, and not be dragged into the same rabbit hole that I’m currently trapped in. For a really good introduction to alternative concepts of time, I would recommend Jay Griffiths’ excellent book Pip Pip.

Jay Griffiths’ excellent book Pip Pip

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”

— Michael Altshuler

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While in this process of reassessment it’s especially pleasing to have been selected to show some of this as yet unresolved work at the forthcoming New Art Exchange (NAE) Open in Nottingham. The exhibition opens on May 20th and runs till September 23rd. I’m excited to be amongst the 44 selected artists and it is set to be a really interesting show. I’d urge you to see it if you can.

Some of my work from No Way Back From Where I’ve Been will be on show at the NAE Open

In other news, the Night Moods exhibition that I curated with Shutter Hub has just under a month to run before it comes to a close. It’s been an incredible experience putting this exhibition together, and I’m really proud to have been able to showcase night photography in this way, something that’s been a passion of mine since I bought my first camera ten years ago now.

You can read some more of my thoughts about this project here and you can experience the exhibition itself, here. Fingers crossed that I can take on more curatorial projects in future.

I’m also happy to have recently been awarded DYCP funding by Arts Council England to spend dedicated time developing the writing element of my practice. This is a significant milestone for me and will hopefully, at the very least, result in these blogs being a bit less painful to read!

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I want to leave you with a few things that have been interesting or inspiring me recently.

the creative (Apologies to all the other artists who do this whose idea I’ve clearly stolen, but I’ve made so many creative discoveries by following these threads that I feel it’s justified…you can thank me later!)

• I really enjoyed reading The Creative Act: A Way Of Being by Rick Rubin. A great way to refocus on why the pursuit of creativity matters and a reminder to keep the main things the main things.

• Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is a must see for people like me who grew up loving the work of the man behind Marty McFly. Also worth watching for an insight into the way Parkinson’s disease affects people, and the way people respond to and live with progressive and chronic illness.

• This live performance of Stakes Is High by De La Soul (and The Roots) was legendary. After you’ve watched this, do yourself a favour and go ahead and listen to the whole Stakes Is High album (then the rest of De La’s discography, which is now available everywhere!). The fact their music has now been opened up to new audiences is one of the best things about this year so far.

Till next time…

*future, 100%!

All Of The Things She Put Me Through: On Photography and Memory

(Disclaimer: I should warn you, there turns out to be quite a bit of Usher in this post)

Something about the way the light dances off a surface startles you, a subconscious stimulus causing you to turn just in time to notice a dying wisp of sound at the boundary of your perception, beyond which dreams and memories reside. You instinctively reach for the camera hanging at your hip, but before it reaches your eye the vanished reverie leaves you frozen, momentarily uncertain as to what caused you to stop in the first place.

Perhaps this has happened to you too, and you’ve experienced the uncanny way the subconscious whirl can occasionally spill into your waking hours. The way you can be somewhere new and suddenly experience an almost visceral certainty that some part of you has been here before, and that the only way to be sure is to capture it in your box of memories, a frame at a time.

The connection between visual images and memory has been extensively explored and has long occupied writers and researchers. The practice of photography lends itself to nostalgia of course, from the very act of capturing a single moment in time and space and the numerous decisions and omissions that this act involves, to the fact that the relentless development of photographic technologies and the torrential pace of image sharing practices confers an immediately archival status to each photograph we take. The materiality of printed photographs offers a tangible illustration of this encapsulation of memory, a fact that Alec Soth discusses here:

Artists often seem to play with this relationship, using the link to nostalgia and memory for creative or narrative purposes, but even if your intention is not to exploit this link it is worth being mindful that it exists, such is its pervasiveness in the collective consciousness.

As I’m writing this my mind’s going off on a tangent, to a song…I’m blaming Twitter for this one though as this man is probably on my mind at the moment due to how frequently he’s popped up on my feed over the last week or so as the subject of a meme. Anyway, in this song he puts forth a learned exposition on the connection between his visual perception and his memories and thus it is totally relevant!

Anyway, back to what I was saying…photography and memory, yes…

So, this is something that’s been bubbling away in my own work recently as I continue to slowly piece together something new. In recent weeks I’ve also had the pleasure of discussing this topic with some fellow photographers and have really valued their perspectives on this idea.

Working my way through some of my own childhood photographs, I’ve been experimenting with how altering these images and placing them alongside contemporary photos changes their reading. This is not a visual device that I invented, by any means. For example, Damien Williams uses this technique to great effect in his work Black Other.

Screen grab of some scanned childhood photos

What’s been most notable so far, aside from the technical challenge of making visually plausible adjustments to these photos, has been my emotional response to them. Working with these photos has stirred up quite unnerving emotions, often not directly related to the content of the pictures themselves or to a recollection of the events the photos depict. The photos have rather triggered a general sense of overwhelming wistfulness, a sense that the places and people contained within them have slipped into an adjacent timeline right alongside my own, of which I’m aware but that still remains stubbornly out of reach. It’s a weird thing and difficult to properly describe, but it’s been striking just how deep-rooted that feeling is and how readily it is summoned by even a few minutes with these old images.

The work I’m making in some way describes a journey and I guess every journey is about change. Maybe that’s what nostalgia is, an acute and sometimes jarring awareness of change. There is something almost mystical about it though isn’t there? Otherwise it would just be a straightforward memory, a factual recounting of previous happenings.

This elusive element is something that has always intrigued me and I’m often drawn to artists who find ways to represent this, or at least hint at a process of wrestling with this ‘thing’ in their work. Off the top of my head, Todd Hido’s Between the Two comes to mind as a body of work that gave me the same feels, like you’d seen these scenes somewhere, somehow before, almost subconsciously. Of course, this response is mediated by a range of our own personal experiences and memories so that no two people will respond in the same way to the work, but it’s an example that comes to mind.

In speaking with someone recently about this a question occurred to me: is nostalgia a tool that can be knowingly utilised at any time, at the artist’s discretion, or does it instead only show itself in the work through a process of the artist’s divination of their own subconscious? Do we only see it in the work when the practitioner finds a way to drag from within themselves an impression of their past or dreamworld, and reconstitute it in the present?

The answer to these questions feels like an unsolvable riddle, partly because it strays into the territory of suggesting that an objective and rational deconstruction of the artistic process is even possible and I’m not sure that it is. Also, the phrases ‘artist’s divination of their own subconscious’ and ‘artist’s discretion’ that I used above may actually be describing the same thing!

So, there we are. I’ll admit that this didn’t go where I thought it would when I started writing, but I guess where we’ve ended up is where we’re supposed to be.

I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of possible answers to these questions, a whole mountain range of different perspectives on how nostalgia and artistic practice are related, if indeed they are. As always, I’d be interested to hear yours if you care to share it.

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Werkhaus Zine Issue 3 will be available very soon

In other news, I’m delighted to have some work published in the forthcoming 3rd issue of Werkhaus Zine from Workhorse Collective, especially because the submission includes some stuff I wrote that’s related to the project I’m currently (very slowly) working on.

To have these reflections published alongside work in progress is really pleasing and probably also means I’m going to continue writing these blogs as well for the foreseeable (sorry!), to keep my ideas simmering away.

Next time it’ll probably be something about identity as that’s another theme currently occupying my brain warehouse. For now, I’ll leave you with the ubiquitous meme, so it can contaminate your mind like it’s done mine.

Till next time…

Getting Used To Getting Less

To those of us who spend possibly more time than we should contemplating the way the world is, and not quite enough time simply diving feet first in to the ever-changing quotidian tide of life, the last couple of years have thrown up a number of additional points for consideration. Towards the end of last year I wrote a piece for a forthcoming publication based on a topic I’d been thinking a lot about since the beginning of the pandemic. I re-read that piece again this week and felt I’d done a less than superb job of articulating what my concern actually was and so, dear patient reader, I’ve chosen to inflict my second attempt to explain myself on you :)

In the early phase of the pandemic I was struck by how quickly we all became totally dependent on technology to mediate our connections with each other. These technologies were already available and in regular use of course but as events forced us indoors, often alone, we all had no choice but to download Zoom and adapt. Former technophobes were unmuting and hopping in and out of breakout rooms with masterful ease and it seemed that, on the face of it, the circumstances were at least encouraging more people into a more connected online life that would ultimately be enriching for them personally, as well as ushering in new ways of working and methods of relating to one another for all of us.

At this point many will agree that this has indeed been the outcome, will happily chalk it up as yet another success for the modern world and move on to more pressing concerns. To those folk, thanks for popping in…

An image from the Reaching Out Into The Dark project

I’ve long been interested in the way people experience being alone, particularly in urban settings and as the first lockdown stretched out like an old elastic band and the concept of time itself seemed increasingly pliable, I couldn’t help wondering whether this precipitous adoption of remote communication technologies was an entirely wholesome phenomenon.

The idea that the inexorable reliance on computers or artificial intelligence might not be all good is not a novel one. Academics and authors such as Sherry Turkle have challenged the propagation of this computerised utopia for many years, and these questions have also provided endless hours of cinematic material in movies such as The Matrix and I, Robot.

And while I’m certainly not trying to slap you across the face with the notion that communication technologies will singlehandedly herald the demise of humanity, I would raise a tentative hand to ask you to pause for a moment and consider how these technologies have impacted on your own relationships and your sense of connection to others.

Any commuter on public transport will be familiar with the experience of being surrounded by people, all mesmerised by their individual devices, oblivious to those around them (Or maybe you aren’t, which possibly also proves the point!). If you live in the average town or city you no doubt spend significant parts of every day slaloming around urban zombies who shuffle around heads bowed, entranced by their phones. Maybe these people feel hyperconnected, and thus unable to tolerate even a momentary detachment from their device in order to let the world and their immediate surroundings in via their other senses. They might even argue that they’re actually optimising their presence, making use of every possible moment to connect with someone or something and that the fact that this may seem to exclude people in their immediate vicinity is simply a quirk of geography.

This is the story the technology companies would have us believe, that our lives have been immeasurably improved by the ever closer integration of their software with our daily rhythms. That our addiction to their products is a surrogate for our innate desire to be closer to those who are meaningful to us. Viewed this way it’s impossible to be critical, because who would rebuke someone who just wants to be more connected to their friends and family, right?

But perhaps the counterargument rests on an appraisal of the gap between the quality of the connections we crave and those we manage to achieve via these communication technologies. In her book Alone Together Turkle argues that one of the dangers of increasing remote communication is a progressive sense of disconnection that makes achieving sincere or meaningful communication much more difficult:

"Texting an apology is really impersonal. You can't hear their voice. They could be sarcastic, and you wouldn't know.”…”It's harder to say ‘Sorry' than text it, and if you’re the one receiving the apology, you know it's hard for the person to say 'Sorry.' But that is what helps you forgive the person - that they're saying it in person, that they actually have the guts to actually want to apologize." In essence, both young women are saying that forgiveness follows from the experience of empathy. You see someone is unhappy for having hurt you. You feel sure that you are standing together with them. When we live a large part of our personal lives online, these complex empathetic transactions become more elusive. We get used to getting less.

Alone Together, 3rd edition, p. 234

If we are ‘getting less’ meaningful connection with others as a consequence of the shift to online communication methods, what can we do about it? Is it even a problem, or simply a function of progress in the same way that we came to rely less on horses to get to the shops after the introduction of the motor car?

My instinct tells me that this shift increases the risk of loneliness, even as the means of being connected to others proliferate. A range of people who depend on more than just instincts to make their pronouncements would also agree (phew). My ongoing ruminations about this idea - how our changed relationship to technologies due to COVID-19 has affected our ability to connect with each other - will form the next unit of my Reaching Out Into The Dark project and I’ll no doubt keep you updated in future posts.

I’d be keen to hear your views on this…what are your own experiences over the last couple of years? Does any of this ring true to you? Or do you feel that communication technologies and devices are inherently neutral and thus cannot be held responsible for anything other than the performance of the function for which they were designed? (Also a valid point of view)

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Two other bits of news…

I’ve now set up a mailing list for those discerning people who want to be kept informed about what I’m up to. Thanks so much to those of you who suggested the idea and encouraged me to start one and to those who’ve already signed up. I am grateful for the support and to have you on board and I truly value the interactions and feedback these posts generate. The responses and counterarguments really help me further develop my ideas and I’m thankful for the stimulus to keep wondering. If you’ve not yet signed up but would like to, you can do so on this page.

The image below has been selected by Shutter Hub Editions for publication in their forthcoming collection ROAD TRIP, that explores the question ‘what does ROAD TRIP mean to you?’. The book should be available later this year and here’s hoping there’s at least one picture in it of a child screaming “are we there yet?” from the back seat.

And so we arrive at the end of another update. The only thing left to do is to close with a song (hehe, no I didn’t forget!)

Till next time…

On Persistence and Beauty

One of the challenges of artistic practice is deciding how much of your workings to show, particularly during periods where most of your work is happening behind the scenes.

Most practitioners hope to make work that reveals something, whether that’s a particular truth about themselves (possibly hidden behind an anonymising artistic veneer), to put forward a viewpoint that others can respond to, maybe contribute to an ongoing discourse or, even better, provide an entirely novel perspective.

During the course of the last couple of years, as a pandemic and the relentless pace of profound events left us grasping for only the most important things, and where stability has at times felt impossible to achieve or maintain, it’s been hard to know where to look for insight and inspiration, and I’ve certainly found it really difficult to get into a creative headspace.

There’s something about the way we adapt to changing circumstances though isn’t there, that means eventually we’ll often find ways to survive and even thrive during the most turbulent periods, in the same way you’re able to tune out that piercingly loud alarm that initially shocked you out of your sleep. That capacity to adapt and become reconciled to changed circumstances continues to allow us all to live in this current time.

Reminds me of a song:

Things are changing, life is hard, blah blah like whatever! People get by…so what Justin?

Well, the crux of the challenge of artistic practice seems to me to be the ability to simply persist, despite the prevailing circumstances. To continue getting by. To remain committed to the act of creating, producing, thinking, re-examining, recombining, revising and revisiting. This imperative is paramount and independent of a desire for financial compensation or dreams of notoriety, and of course it’s almost impossible to achieve any of the latter without the former.

The most successful artists aren’t those who shine most brightly for a season of possibly majestic brilliance, but those who remain doggedly consistent amidst the turmoil that characterises the world in which we all live. Many (the majority?) of these artists will never be widely known, but they persist anyway. This singular passion sustains the artist even if alone it often, unfortunately, cannot put food on the table and belies the idea that artists are somehow less diligent than people in other disciplines. I’m arguing that persistence is an achievement in itself, especially now…and if you’ve been able to simply keep going in whatever way that means for you, then you deserve all the credit in the world. Much of that behind the scenes work may simply have been about survival, and that’s fine too. 

If you’re an artistic practitioner and you’ve made it this far, well done! Take a moment to acknowledge your own success. Then keep going.

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At the moment I’m working on a project that considers the benefits that can arise out of the most painful experiences. One of the questions I’ve been thinking about a lot during the research phase revolves around the artistic ethics of depicting terrible circumstances or events in a way that might be called ‘beautiful’ visually. Beauty is of course highly subjective, but should an artist seek to make work that tends towards their own conception of beauty, if the subject of the work is grim?

This question was prominent for me while watching ‘The Underground Railroad’ recently, the Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. This series deals with the most horrific acts but looks truly breathtaking the entire time. At times the visual beauty of this work felt really jarring to me, but also forced me to think more deeply about the wider impact of what was being depicted. In this case I concluded that the photogenic visual canvas on which the events of this work were drawn actually served to further highlight the dark atrocity of the acts committed, by sheer contrast. I would however accept the counter argument that to construct such a visual feast somehow diminishes or glosses over the heinous nature of the crimes portrayed. 

This video gives something of a taste of the look of the series:

Does the visual tone of this video feel congruent with a series about the horrific traumas of slavery? I’d be really interested to hear the reader’s reflections on this. 

Certainly something to consider, but ultimately I guess the choice lies with each practitioner to strike that balance where they feel most comfortable, accepting that the viewer will be the ultimate judge of the success of your choices. It’s a tricky balance to strike for sure. 

Another reflection is that sometimes striving for ‘beauty’ when depicting difficult or traumatic events might help to prevent the work sliding into a lazy or stereotypical portrayal. This is no bad thing either and possibly another justification for taking this approach. The history of visual art is littered with examples of practitioners who resorted to the most trite imagery to hammer home their point, often removing any sense of subtlety or nuance in the presentation of their (often) disadvantaged and disenfranchised subjects in the process. So maybe, producing something ‘beautiful’ offers a more layered presentation of your subject and offers the viewer the opportunity to consider that things might not be as straightforward as they first assumed. I don’t have the answers here…it’s just a thought. 

Hopefully I’ll have more to share from the project I’m currently working on in the very near future. In the meantime, please accept my offering of this photo of some footprints. An indicator that we’re almost at the end of this particular journey.

And to close, another song to really hammer home today’s theme:

Till next time, keep persisting.

Actually Making It Happen

Music video by Mariah Carey performing Make It Happen. YouTube view counts pre-VEVO: 21,232 (C) 1991 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Is it just me or are people crossing

the road more than they were before? Maybe

I'm paranoid, is that a symptom, been

hard to keep track of all the news. I see

Black humans keep dying though, a mystery

apparently, unrelated of course

to the fact PPE rules changed daily.

An image in response to the poetry written for this project

The making of this work started with a basic plan, a flowchart written on an A4 sheet of paper. Once everything’s mapped out you’re often painfully aware of how much ground there actually is to cover and that was certainly the case here. 

How do you cover loss, grief, loneliness, shielding, contracting COVID, looking after COVID patients, losing your job, worrying about your friends and family, worrying about the world, health inequalities due to racism, systemic racism and more in ‘3 - 5 images’, which was the brief we’d been given? 

The first plan

Well you can’t can you! My wildly ambitious original proposal crashed into the unyielding realities of the time we had to complete the work and the quixotic scope of my plan was abruptly reshaped into something more manageable and achievable in the timeframe we had to work with. The dispassionate wisdom of Andrew Jackson was again crucial here, pointing out the potential range of this work if done comprehensively and how it might be sensible to consider it as a related series of smaller projects to continue working on beyond the current deadline. 

Even with this advice in mind the scope of the project remained daunting. My original plan was to contrast the experience of my mother, who’d been sheltering during the first lockdown, with my own as a front line health worker. I’d discussed this with my mom before proposing the project and she’d kindly agreed to work with me, so the plan was for her to respond to some questions about her experiences of sheltering alone during the first few months of the pandemic and I would use these reflections and some writing of my own to inform the images I would subsequently make. 

Once I’d been selected for the project I passed the questions to her and she started gathering her thoughts while I started writing some rudimentary poetry that captured some of my instinctive responses to events of these last few months. The main aim here was just to get thoughts out of my head onto the page and see if any themes or ideas resonated for further exploration visually. 

6 questions given to my mother to elicit her experiences about sheltering at home during the first months of the pandemic

This process of writing turned out to be somewhat unsettling both for my mother and myself, forced as we were to confront the true extent of the personal toll the pandemic had had on us individually and as a family. What was interesting though were the similarities in our reflections despite our very different experiences. Ideas such as grief for a way of life lost, fear of adapting to the ‘new normal’ and of other things, uncertainty of how to interpret one’s perception of increased risk as a Black person and determination to preserve some freedoms now seemingly under threat shone through. Many of these themes had been anticipated when planning the work and the task now of course was to try and translate some of these ideas into pictures.

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“I fear having to be admitted to hospital for any reason. I live with conditions that can be detrimental, but now COVID has been added to the mix of things I have to be careful about… 

If I became an inpatient, in a COVID-heightened environment, I fear that I would not come out of hospital.” 

An image in response to mother’s words above, articulating her fears about contracting COVID-19

Meanwhile of course, the pandemic continued apace. My region introduced stricter COVID restrictions as the project deadline closed in and with very little shooting having taken place. This forced me to change plans and I now had to pivot to a more restricted approach with less travelling, less visits to my mother’s house simply for the purpose of making photographs and a decision to stay very close to my own home as much as possible. This meant having to reconsider how I would put together a coherent series of 3 to 5 images despite abandoning some locations I’d considered integral to telling the story.

Thankfully due to the preparation that had already been done, some flexibility on shooting days and photographic luck, I was able to hit enough of the touchpoints despite these last minute changes. In this case, the planning and synthesising of ideas took up by far the majority of time and effort invested in the work, with actual camera time being only a small fraction of the overall activity. 

This is possibly the most useful lesson arising from this project, that the time spent planning, writing, conceptualising and reflecting on the themes pays itself back exponentially when it comes to making the pictures. It’s surely possible to work the other way round, to start out by creating the images and then slowly piece them together into a coherent narrative, but I’d argue that is a much less efficient and more time-consuming way to work (although possibly involves less agonising). That’s not to criticise different approaches, and I’ve certainly worked that way myself in the past, but rather a realisation for me that I’d gained a better understanding of my own process as a result of being given this opportunity by ReFramed and have been able to build on foundations laid during my MA studies. 

I’ve spent some time gathering my thoughts since completing this work and found the wise words of my old tutor Wendy McMurdo swirling around in my head (as ever!).

DACS member, Wendy McMurdo talks to DACS about her work and artistic processes. A photographer and filmmaker, Wendy speaks about the impact of computers and ...

The thing that she always told me that I find myself going back to repeatedly is the need to simply persist, to keep making work and to remain committed to the process of being creative. Another astute idea of hers, reflected in this interview, is of staying faithful to subjects that interest you. As a result of this COVID work, and following on from a recent chat I had with the Photography Ethics Centre, I’ve had some new ideas about revisiting elements of my Reaching Out Into The Dark (ROITD) project and reconsidering loneliness in the context of the pandemic. It’s clearly been a time where many of us have been confronted by isolation, loneliness and disconnection from previously nurturing social networks and I’m looking forward to picking up this subject again with a fresh perspective moving forward. 

So on that note I’ll leave you with another song. This one can be found on the ROITD project playlist and is where the title for the project came from. 

Till next time…

Directed by James Mooney Belong is taken from the new album Recycle Love. Featuring TriniCassette, God Zombie, Visionz and Fresh. Edited by Joe Carey https:/...

Let's Make Something Happen

As my man Phife Diggy from A Tribe Called Quest once said:

Put one up for the Phifer, it's time to decipher

The ills of the world make the situation brighter

I wish I could sit down with Phife and discuss this right now. I’d respectfully ask him if he still felt this way after the year we’ve had. The ills of the world have been difficult to ignore in 2020 and I’ve personally struggled to navigate this while confronted with the necessity to create.

Thankfully though, the first stage of the ReFramed COVID-19 project is now complete and with images submitted the focus moves on to planning how the work will be published and shared. This also allows for some reflection and quite honestly the process has been tortuous although ultimately very rewarding. The challenges I anticipated at the project’s outset, mainly practical, were quickly superseded by the emotional and philosophical hurdles I encountered as I started to unpack the main themes I hoped to explore in the work.

The COVID crisis has forced us all to confront loss, anger, abrupt and drastic change, loneliness and isolation and any number of anxieties on personal, family, community, national and worldwide levels. That’s a lot!

The horrific onslaught seems almost commonplace now, such that its ongoing impact can be overlooked, but we’re all still wading through all of this stuff with no end in sight. The sheer scale of all the ‘stuff’ has at times been utterly paralysing, making it impossible to see beyond the deluge of each moment to anything approaching an abstract or creative idea. It’s difficult to plan, dream and conceptualise in that state…which is not to say that there aren’t people out there who’ve managed to be incredibly productive and creative during these months, just that I’ve not been one of them!

I’m very grateful for the guidance of Andrew Jackson, one of the ReFramed team, who has been mentoring me through the last couple of months. He’s been able to provide wise counsel and some outside objectivity during moments of doubt and/or sheer panic, grounded in his own experiences as a practitioner and human. The opportunity to bounce ideas off him and pick his brain has been one of the most valuable elements of the bursary award. 

How do you avoid getting trapped in your own head, when you have to go in there to find the work?

Also, how do you separate yourself from the subject, by at least enough, to be able to say something about it that resonates outside of yourself?

Acknowledging and reconciling the many ways in which I am personally and profoundly connected to this work (as a Black person, as a healthcare professional, as a survivor of COVID-19) was one of the first barriers that had to be overcome before I was able to successfully proceed to actually making the pictures and consumed by far the majority of the effort in the completion of this project.

One of the overriding feelings while conceiving this work was a simmering frustration, a feeling that encompassed my own personal circumstances as well as wider considerations. Apart from the direct and immediately devastating impact COVID-19 has had on individuals, families and communities, this year has in many ways highlighted deep inequities that deny so many people true agency in their own lives and render them unable to fully explore their own potential or define their own futures. To some this might sound like a crazy assertion - ‘we live in a free country Justin, everyone has the same opportunities and chances’ - but if you’re of this view I’d urge you to step outside of your own experience for a minute and do some basic research, with an open mind. 

While I don’t have the space, time or inclination to unpack all of that for you here, I would like to present some information that’s relevant to the ReFramed COVID-19 project. This from an Office for National Statistics report on coronavirus-related deaths, from May 2020:

• This provisional analysis has shown that the risk of death involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) among some ethnic groups is significantly higher than that of those of White ethnicity.

• When taking into account age in the analysis, Black males are 4.2 times more likely to die from a COVID-19-related death and Black females are 4.3 times more likely than White ethnicity males and females.

• People of Bangladeshi and Pakistani, Indian, and Mixed ethnicities also had statistically significant raised risk of death involving COVID-19 compared with those of White ethnicity.

• After taking account of age and other socio-demographic characteristics and measures of self-reported health and disability at the 2011 Census, the risk of a COVID-19-related death for males and females of Black ethnicity reduced to 1.9 times more likely than those of White ethnicity.

• Similarly, males in the Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic group were 1.8 times more likely to have a COVID-19-related death than White males when age and other socio-demographic characteristics and measures of self-reported health and disability were taken into account; for females, the figure was 1.6 times more likely. 

• These results show that the difference between ethnic groups in COVID-19 mortality is partly a result of socio-economic disadvantage and other circumstances, but a remaining part of the difference has not yet been explained.

Feel free to read the full report, here

The disparity of experience of the pandemic is mirrored in many other areas of modern life and while I’ve highlighted ethnic inequalities above, there are numerous gender/class/postcode-based inequalities to be found everywhere. Every day yet another aggrieved group seems to be crying out for help, for equitable treatment and proper consideration. Today for example, it’s the people of Greater Manchester, but tomorrow it will be something or someone else. 

COVID-19 has dragged all of these issues into the light and unmasked so much that had previously only been covertly plotted and secretly endured. These prevailing concerns and the unease that they foment form the backdrop for the work that I ended up making for ReFramed. To have made something that failed to acknowledge this thread of feeling running through the last 6 months for me would have felt ludicrously dishonest. 

Next time, I’ll go into a bit more detail about the process of actually developing the work with these considerations in mind. Until then it’s only right that we finish with some more ATCQ because, why not…

Let’s make something happen!

The past (dreams), the present and COVID-19

Phew, that's been a mad few months hasn't it! Writing now feels indulgent, almost as if we aren't still gripped by a pandemic, surrounded by the rubble of life as we knew it. Yet we must persist, stumbling forward through the murk, blindly hoping that better days lie ahead though we can’t yet see them.

I'm wondering how many of us have been challenged to reconsider our priorities in recent months. I certainly have, forced to examine so many best laid plans, exploded in moments by unforeseen virulence. How resilient are your dreams when faced with unprecedented obstacles? This is a question I'm still figuring out while trying to reconcile the unavoidable need to shift and adapt to changing circumstances.

One way to view the chaos of 2020 is as a bringer of opportunity (stay with me!), as surely the people who will weather the COVID storm most successfully are those who’ve been able to pivot most easily, to identify and hold on to the most crucial things and willingly let go of everything else, moving forward into the unknown with an optimistic lightness. 

Since last writing in May I've been obliged to switch focus from the project I was developing then, following the award of a bursary by the Midlands-based photographic network ReFramed to make some work that examines the experience of COVID-19 by Black and Asian communities. There’s clearly a lot to cover there, and with only two months to submit I’ll be working diligently to distill all the potential themes and content down to a coherent small body of work. A different challenge to anything I've done previously, but an exciting one for sure. I'll be documenting the progress of this work here over the next few weeks, with a view to discussing some of the underlying themes and providing some background to the process.

There have been too many tragedies arising from the last few months, so much suffering, it's difficult to make sense of it all. One of the most striking things for me has been the many contrasts and conflicts that have arisen, provoked by an unseen but deadly enemy, that has unmasked a number of fault lines in our society and way of life. The haves and have nots, the disproportionate devastation wrought by the virus in communities of colour, the shielders and the minimum wage front line workers...in each pocket of society, forced into isolation from each other by the virus, there is a different story to tell.

The world is unrecognisable to all of us now and the future is uncertain. Amidst this of course, some have been confronted by the traumatic reiteration of violent systemic racism and embedded social injustice. This seems to overshadow everything for me currently, an horrific exclamation mark on an already terrible year, amplifying the pain of various COVID-related hurts. The effects of racism are an inescapable burden, whose weight varies from day to day but from which you are never relieved. Lately it's sunk right down into the bones of everything, burning and aching and causing a nagging restlessness. 

One of the things I've never reconciled is the apparent indifference and ignorance of some, who have remained blissfully unaware that life is fundamentally different for others in ways that have been graphically illustrated in recent times. A benefit of privilege I suppose, but it's evident that injustice can only really survive in an environment of indifference, it can only thrive where blissful ignorance does also. One of the consequences of the pain awoken by recent events is a stark realisation that I can't be party to the indifference any more, being a quiet bystander is just not tenable any longer. I have to do something, say something, be part of solutions rather than a silent sufferer and co-conspirator. It's way past time. 

Being an active force for change requires focus, understanding of one’s sphere of influence and a plan. The first tentative steps in my plan will be making this work for ReFramed. There's been a big focus in some quarters on the fact that people from Black and Asian communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. There's been a lot of speculation, theorising and hand-wringing, as there has been about other perturbing facts of the last few months. One thing that has been unsurprisingly lacking though is any sense of urgency to take tangibly effective action to address this issue. Reports are commissioned, risks assessments are mandated but what comes next? Again, we are victims of the paralysis of indifference and of the unfortunate fact that nobody seems able to muster the energy to concentrate on an issue for more than a moment if it isn't directly and continuously affecting them personally. The capacity to empathise and thus to step forward as an active advocate or ally seems in short supply. So energy then and determination are needed, to overwhelm indifference and demand attention for long enough for something, anything to really change. 

The Government announces another commission to investigate the mysteries of ethnic disparities.

What's this got to do with photography Justin? Well, visual media has played a critical role in all of the issues discussed above. What did you think when yet another photograph of an unfortunate front line worker dead from COVID flashed up on the news? What message was portrayed when Boris Johnson broadcasted from his isolation looking clearly unwell? How different would the last few months have been if nobody had been there to record as a policeman knelt on George Floyd’s neck?

Photography has had a pivotal role in shaping the perceptions of minority communities in the minds of a supposedly enlightened Western society almost since the inception of the medium. So much of this indoctrination is now so deeply embedded in our understanding of the world it is incredibly difficult to unpick, and certainly impossible to do so if one is indifferent to, or willingly ignorant of, the power of imagery and its role as a fundamental tool in the wielding of power by one group over another. It's incumbent on us then to question how imagery is used, to challenge it when its use clearly has malign intent and seek to recruit the power of photography for a more positive purpose, that of bringing to light elements of life that have been previously and repeatedly misrepresented or simply unseen. By doing so, one hopes to contribute to a cumulative effort to reframe prevailing narratives and bring more reality and balance to public discourse about sensitive issues.

It’s clear that we are living through a time of individual and collective reckoning, where previously unquestioned practice is being looked at from a more informed standpoint and being shown to be in fact highly questionable (see Magnum Photos). It’s incumbent on every practitioner in a visual medium to reflect on what their own role is in the bigger picture.

Research/Life

One of the reasons I decided to write about my work in progress in this way was to affirm (and remind myself of) the fact that the reality of the creative process is rarely of a brilliant artist working singlemindedly towards the production of a widely-acclaimed masterpiece, but rather a quite normal person, who cares about something, battling various practical and financial obstacles in order to bring into being a piece of work that, in the majority of cases, nobody else cares about at all, with the progress towards this objective being anything other than a straight line. 

Thinking about this brings to mind the wise words of Wendy McMurdo, an actually brilliant artist, who I was fortunate to be tutored by in the final phase of my MA. During one of my many existential crises she calmly informed me that the numerous issues and problems preventing me from making work that I was describing to her were in fact simply part and parcel of being an artist, and that the associated self-doubt and uncertainty were all part of the creative process. Her advice being that I should basically suck it up and make work anyway because that was the only way anything ever got done, the only way any progress was ever made. Coming from her, these words meant a great deal and have stuck with me ever since. 

So, I write to remind myself of this and also to keep myself accountable and it is in this spirit that I make this latest entry in the WIP log. The last few months have of course being challenging for everyone, what with the rona, and life as we knew it seems to be gone for good. I’ve been overwhelmed with work stuff and also had to survive my own bout of the virus, so it’s been a challenging time for sure. Amongst all this though, I’ve tried to stay committed to the idea of continuing on regardless, as best as I could under the circumstances. One of the lessons I think, is that instead of being hard on yourself for not being as productive or creative as maybe you’d hoped to be in certain circumstances, it’s preferable to stick to your guns and just do what you can. Every little helps and with each small step you’re that bit little closer to the end goal. It’s important for me to remember that there never is a ‘perfect’ time to make work, with absolutely no obstacles or distractions to contend with, there’s always just now.

As I’ve continued planning and researching for a project focusing on mental health, there’s been an inexorable convergence with the themes of Reaching Out. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

Loneliness and solitude certainly offer psychological challenges, but it’s been really interesting that I’ve found myself circling back round and being forced to consider loneliness from new angles. Another lesson perhaps, that research is never wasted even if it seems to be not directly related to the topic at hand at first, and a reminder that my MA work lives on, and remains unfinished business. 

I’ve been reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. Looking at how loneliness has been conceptualised, written about and experienced through history, it’s an ambitious work indeed. Interestingly, Alberti starts from the position that loneliness is not intrinsically bad, and that there are positives to be gained from experiencing this state. Describing loneliness as a ‘cluster of emotions’ rather than a single feeling, the author argues that it hits differently at different life stages such as divorce or old age. Alberti also argues that loneliness is not an inevitable or universal aspect of the human experience, and when encountered can also confer benefits such as increased self-knowledge or creativity. 

It’s fascinating to consider that loneliness has not always been with us, simply because the vocabulary associated with this experience did not exist before about 200 years ago. Prior to that, being alone was not at all bound up with typically negative ideas of loneliness that we take for granted today, but rather considered a much more neutral state of being. This idea is really interesting to me, that how we describe or think about things, materially affects the way we experience them and it’s an interesting idea to explore visually in the future.

Another book I’ve covered recently is Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr. This is an interesting story, about a woman going through a difficult time who’s revisited by an imaginary friend from her childhood, returned to accompany her through her troubles. This friend, a lion named Jericho, appears when things seem to be slowly falling apart in her life, and while their relationship is never fully explained, there quickly develops a seemingly mutually beneficial co-dependence. The key theme that resonated with me here was the idea of perception, of being able to ascertain what is real and what is not, and whether sometimes it’s actually easier, even safer, to surrender to the constructions of our minds rather than address difficult things in the ‘real’ world. The idea of spending so long immersed in your own perceptions that you struggle to differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined is also interesting. How does one categorise experiences that can seem very real to us, and from which we may derive some positives, if they are not perceptible to others…are they any less valuable, less real? This boundary between our tangible material world, and that of our very personal, internal world is a fascinating place to explore.

What’s New?

Despite not being outwardly productive in recent times, I’ve been quietly plotting some new work. In addition to this, I’ve also been fortunate that the work I started during my MA has continued to generate discussion and act as an opening to new opportunities. 

One of these opportunities came as the result of some images from ROITD being selected to be shown in the first exhibition of Shutter Hub’s ambitious new project. Postcards From Great Britain aims to share visions of British culture through photographic images and promote connection and debate. The images include social, political, observational, historical and traditional responses and when the project finally closes, at the end of this year, the submitted work in its entirety will be archived and housed in various significant collections worldwide. 

Images are presented in postcard format, depicting visions of British life

The project will be punctuated with exhibitions throughout Europe, the first of which opened this week and a happy coincidence of my work schedule allowed me to nip over to Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, to attend the exhibition opening. It was good to be there and I was happy to be able to meet a number of the other exhibiting artists and discuss how they work. These connections stimulated a couple of promising avenues for future exploration and possible collaboration and I’ll expand on this in future updates. 

Attendees at the exhibition opening in Haarlem

Apart from enjoying the short break for the opportunity to see the exhibition, I was also able to get out for a quick photo walk and the mental space of being away also allowed me to continue planning for the main focus of this year, which will be an exhibition of my own work in collaboration with selected artists, later this year. 

My own research for this is ongoing: I recently finished reading Catch by Simon Robson. The book centres around Catharine (referred to as Catch by her husband), a wife alone at home on a winter’s day while her husband works away in Birmingham. She is bored, self-critical, over analytical, aloof, over-serious, frustrated by a lack of musical talent, envious of other more frivolous/artistic/bohemian people, embodied in this case by her friend Masha.

She is also, evidently, dissatisfied by her inability to have a child with her husband Tom. 

Cover of Catch by Simon Robson

The writing is often overly elaborate, to the detriment of the narrative and the revelation of character. However the author still manages to depict an unraveling, a sense of quite rapidly losing touch with oneself and the certainty of circumstances that previously anchored you in place. Catharine quickly loses touch with her sense of self, caught up in an accelerating cycle of thoughts, careering towards the dissolution of her marriage, the destruction of her longstanding friendship with Masha and to the relinquishing of her sanity, triggered by innocuous events such as a conversation with a disaffected teenager in the village and some low level flirting with a retiree.

This feeling of being captive to self-destructive thoughts, apparently founded on ‘fact’ that one is mistakenly convinced of, felt very familiar. This negative feedback spiral can be a very lonely place, where you feel increasingly hopeless, convinced of the futility and finality of everything, and almost unable to listen to reason. This is something I will be exploring in the work that I plan to show later this year.