Getting Used To Getting Less

Justin Carey May 18, 2022

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…

photograph taken at night of an old-style British Telecom phonebox with a bright light shining inside — 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)

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.

Photograph taken at night from inside a car showing the red rear lights of cars ahead on a rainy night

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

Justin Carey April 19, 2022

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.

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

Justin Carey November 5, 2020

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?

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.

“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.