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 The challenges I anticipated at the project’s outset, mainly practical, were quickly superseded by the emotional and philosophical hurdles I encountered as I started to unpack the main themes I hoped to explore in the work.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.