Naomi StannardIoana MarinescuAnna Hindocha

MAke Your MArk

Photographs by:

Naomi Stannardstannard.naomi@googlemail.com

Ioana Marinescumail@ioanamarinescu.com

Anna Hindochaphoto@annahindocha.com

Interview by:

kathleen Breyassistant@viewfinder.org.uk

Curated by:

Louise Forresterlouise@viewfinder.org.uk

Edited by:

Anne-Marie Glasheeneditor@viewfinder.org.uk

Design by:

Mandana Ahmadvazirdesigner@viewfinder.org.uk

Exhibition part sponsored by:

Ambigraph comprises creative couple Anna and Ameet Hindocha. Together they combine their talents and creative approach to produce the highest quality graphic design and photography services tailored to each client’s needs. They have collaborated on projects for many years and pride themselves on their friendly and flexible approach.www.ambigraph.com

Published by:

Viewfinder Photography GalleryLinear House,Peyton Place, off royal Hill,Greenwich, London Se10 8rS

www.viewfinder.org.uk

First published January 2010

© The artists and authors.The views expressed in thispublication are not necessarilythe views of the publisher orthe editors.

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Introduction

'Make Your Mark' brings together the striking work of three photographers – each series explores how the placing of a mark in an environment recreates the space. Marks are documented at three very different scales: in cupboards, in rooms and across cities.

Naomi Stannard's series 'The House I once Called Home' documents her childhood home and the ways in which personal belongings transform a built space into a home. By photographing each meticulously labelled cupboard, the artist creates her own archive and, in effect, a portrait of her family through their own 'marking'.

Anna Hindocha's work investigates the personal and political use of urban space in London. The artist photographs modifications made to rooms by their inhabitants, from eccentric workshops to murals in squatted social centres. Her series 'The People's City' examines manipulated spaces that appear static but which – through their physical modifications – speak of history and activity.

Ioana Marinescu's photographs of yellow pipes document a shifting perception of spaces and imagined itineraries. Taken at the end of the 1990s in her grandparents' town in romania, the photographs follow the lines of the new gas infrastructure. The pipes seem to impose a different order of linear abstraction on the decaying buildings, to usurp other built elements and to define their own territory in the town.

Curator Louise Forrester comments: "I'm delighted to exhibit these three intriguing projects which are each so visually distinct but all speak of the marks we make on our environments. I hope that these images will encourage visitors to become aware of their own mark-making, and to think about reading the marks that surround us all."

Whether subtle manipulation or willful transformation, 'Make Your Mark' imaginatively considers the many ways in which our personal histories are written in the spaces that surround us. This unique exhibition is a timely reminder of our relationships to our environments, and should not be missed.

This exhibition follows the 2008 exhibition 'Marking/erasing' at the Viewfinder, in which mark-making was employed as part of the image-making process.

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l So often we casually observe and navigate our environments, oblivious to our own ways of establishing order. What is it that triggered you to take a closer look? When did you make the decision to photograph a familiar environment?

NS: When my grandfather died last November, it was a big change for the family and started me thinking about what gets left behind once we are gone, and whether it matters. No one looking at my work would know what my grandfather was like or how much my mother is like him, but somehow the labellings have become more potent.

IM: I was in romania a few years ago working on a long-term project on Bucharest. on this occasion I visited my grandparents' town in the mountains. It was winter and snowing, and I remember being slowly pervaded by a sense of absurdity. A whole network of yellow pipes and boxes had invaded the calm appearance of the old streets, moving with its own logic through the town: an over-ground gas system built overnight, a cheap solution for the heating system. Following this ‘disease’ most of the public objects (benches, rubbish bins, newspaper kiosks) had also been painted yellow.

I began to take photographs with my 35 mm camera. Back in London, I processed the images and the pipes looked like drawings over the landscape. I waited another year and returned the following winter with a large-format camera to work on the 'Gas Pipes' series. I deliberately looked for snow, for flat light, no sun, no shade, no interference. The snow acted like a canvas, like a blank space; it quietened and equalized.

AH: London is my metropolis, which, translated literally from the Greek means 'mother city'. I have always been excited by London and the city has often indirectly influenced my work, but I decided to examine it more closely when I began to realise that my view of it was quite different from others. People often talk about the city as inhuman and cold whereas I see it as being quintessentially human. Cities are designed and built by people for people and have ingrained in them the marks of all the people who have lived there over thousands of years. I wanted to show people how I see the city. As the project progressed I moved towards showing the interiors of spaces in the city that the casual passer-by would not be aware of, places that show different possibilities for ways to live in the city.

Interview with Naomi Stannard (NS) Ioana Marinescu (IM)Anna Hindocha (AH) by kathleen Brey

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l Did the environment or place appear unfamiliar when you looked closer at it?

NS: To me photographing around the home has always been a natural thing, as the idea of home and our belongings fascinate me. The spaces began to feel more like home than ever before, and the changes that have since been made, now seem unfamiliar to me.

IM: The yellow lines appeared in this place I've known since childhood and disturbed it. They seemed to draw their own narrative through the town in a rather absurd way. After I’d photographed them in my grandparents’ town, I began noticing them everywhere. The yellow gas pipes are symptomatic of romania. They are a cheap, quick way of solving the heating problem. They are also specific to the long period of transition after 1990. There is a thin layer of reality that interferes with existing structures, an invasion of kiosks and billboards, of improvised structures. Something that is meant to be a temporary solution becomes the norm and is endlessly repeated – the art of permanent improvisation.

AH: Many of the individual places I went to photograph were unfamiliar to me as I was visiting them for the first time. However, the types of places were familiar to me (squats and warehouses); some were friends' houses that I had visited before or places that I revisited several times over the course of the project. When I looked more closely, I noticed different things but felt I was getting to know the spaces better through the act of photographing them.

l As a photographer documenting a space, how are you in fact making your own mark?

IM: The very act of documenting, of constructing and telling a story through images is a way of drawing attention to a phenomenon, a personal interpretation of a fact that would otherwise perhaps go unnoticed. Interestingly, since I exhibited the first 'Gas Pipes', friends or acquaintances have been sending me images of pipes; I've acquired quite a collection of other people's pipe images.

NS: As I photograph around my parents' home, I find that when I return subtle changes have taken place, and so the negatives I own now represent the labellings and markings that were once there and those markings will last a lifetime.

AH: I am making my mark because, by saying that use of space and how these spaces have been altered is important, I am urging people to look more closely. I have built an archive of images of these spaces which I believe is very important, as all of the squatted social centres I photographed have since been evicted.

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The spaces are no longer like this; what I have recorded is the time and effort people had put into transforming these spaces. My photographs are a permanent record of spaces that have disappeared; they have now become 'the mark' that is left.

l All three projects are concerned with perception of the familiar. What do you perceive as the value of re-evaluating spaces?

IM: Photography is a language that can be very effective in bringing out what usually goes unnoticed in our surroundings. By focusing on a particular subject, by framing in a certain way you draw attention to habits, to seemingly familiar situations which can in fact be extremely disturbing. The pipes are at the same time intrusive and subtle. There is an intrinsic danger in the thin metal pipes carrying invisible gas.

NS: Spaces constantly change, so photographing and re-photographing the same spaces is worthwhile as the subtle changes will reveal themselves.

AH: By looking at how city-dwellers have reclaimed, re-appropriated and recycled space in the city, I hope to raise questions about what spaces and facilities people require and whether these needs are being met. I also hope to challenge how we use the city through the order imposed by its structure, to say that we can use space in the city in different ways from those that were intended and that we can do this without permission. I found these spaces inspirational; they show that we can change the city by the way we use it. The value of this is that it opens up possibilities and empowers the people of the city.

l Do you wish that people would be more conscious of the subtle impact they have on their personal environment, or do you feel the most fascinating outcomes occur when people act unconsciously?

IM: I'm trained as an architect so, by profession, I'm concerned with space-making and its usage. I began to photograph almost as a reaction to my surroundings, as a way of commenting on reality. As an architect, I wish my environment to be perfect. As a photographer, I delight in its imperfection.

NS: I believe that some of the most beautiful moments in life happen when we are not constantly re-evaluating ourselves. I think that my family home is so fascinating to me because my parents are so unconscious of the marks they have left.

AH: All of the spaces I photographed had been very consciously modified by people but the parts I was most interested in photographing were often not the parts they felt were most

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important or were even aware of. Sometimes when people consciously change one thing (for example, the use of a building) they are not aware of the impact this has elsewhere that can end up being more interesting.

l What are the challenges a photographer faces in documenting human mark-making?

IM: Human mark-making is so easy to miss and can go unnoticed. It is there waiting to be revealed, like a photograph exposed but not yet developed. The photographer's role is to reveal the latent image, to bring it to light.

NS: The human mark-making that fascinates me is sometimes so subtle that even I overlook the subtle changes. But everything we do usually leaves a mark and for me, one of the biggest challenges in documenting mark-making, is capturing it all.

AH: The marks are not permanent, they can be covered by other marks or eroded by time and other events. Many of the squatted social centres I photographed were cleared and the squatters evicted before I could go back and re-shoot - sometimes before I even got there to shoot in the first place. This constant reworking is one of the fascinating aspects of the city but it has its frustrations.

l How do these projects relate to your other photographic work? Does mark-making appear in other series?

IM: Most of my personal work looks at ways space is inhabited, at the slight absurdities that occur in everyday situations. I'm also concerned with the question of memory, how we remember things and why.

NS: My work has always been hugely influenced by home and by the past. In another series I re-photographed old slides of my parents, placing them in the modern-day surroundings of the home; bringing their ghosts back to life. Home has always been the central theme and the thing that fascinates me most. We all strive to find a place where we belong and where we can make our own mark and this project is really about what our mark-making means once we no longer inhabit a space.

AH: My current project looks at tattooed women, so I have moved on to people who make obvious, conscious marks on their own bodies.

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Photography has become a personal documentation of my life; the real memories and the unreal of my imagination become entwined to create lasting images. As an artist, my main inspiration has stemmed from practitioners who have not been pulled away from what they love doing; in particular the photographer Duane Michals and film-maker Michal Gondry who have not followed the trends. My work is created from the heart, from my memories, my imagination; it is concerned with creating a history from now.

The work 'The House I once Called Home' speaks of the comforts of a house, the memories associated with a building filled with belongings that turn it into a home. I have opened up the cupboards and brought my family's eccentricities into the light. The familiar shadows chasing up the walls, creating patterns that I have come to associate with home. When I was younger I used to believe that my home was the same as everyone else’s, but now I know that it is not! But the quirkiness of writing on everything and hoarding possessions is what makes my family unique and what makes me feel at home.

"... Somehow I had assumed that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself, and that what we had once possessed remained our possession forever, and that at least the past, our past, our childhood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve, did not deteriorate like the untended house of an aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence, flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but, instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down, and we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity if our astonished eyes had time." eric ormsby

The House I Once Called Home Naomi Stannard

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The People’s City Anna Hindocha

I am interested in exploring the personal and political aspects of the use of space in the city. I have investigated spaces that have been physically altered by individuals or small groups of people in a DIY manner and brought into new types of use. I am fascinated by the amount of work and creativity that goes into these transformations.

These images are a selection from my book 'The People’s City'. The photographs were all shot during 2007 and 2008 in London and investigate modified domestic, social and outdoor spaces. Whilst they do not include people, there are many details that allude to the people who modified or created them.

My aim with this work is to provide a counterpoint to the idea that cities are inhuman and homogenous by drawing attention to the ways in which people use space in the city in alternative ways and stand against capitalism and gentrification to make the city a more beautiful, interesting, exciting and free place. Actions such as these refute the idea that commerce, capital and architecture define the purpose of the city but instead remind us what the city is really about and who it is really for. The people.

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Campulung, romania 2002 Visiting my grandparents’ town, Campulung, at the end of the 1990s, I was slowly pervaded by a sense of absurdity. A whole network of yellow pipes and boxes had invaded the calm appearance of the old streets, moving with its own logic through the town: an over-ground gas system built overnight meant to bring the desired warmth and happiness into people’s houses. Following this ‘disease’ most of the public objects in Campulung (benches, rubbish bins, newspaper kiosks) had also been painted yellow.

The ‘Gas Pipes’ photographs are part of a visual research project about memory and identity in post-communist romania.

"The yellow is pleased with itself; proud of itself. It flaunts itself on the pipes and junction boxes. A line of bright energy, its elegant economy draws the eye. Skirting a wall it efficiently climbs a hill; it neatly outlines a doorway; it surmounts a metal fence, rising effortlessly to frame an entrance; it geometrically avoids a window; it curves with perfect rhythm and rhyme over the parallel struts of a portico; assisted by a simple frame it straightway traverses a gap between houses; it speeds through a wood, its brightness drained by the black-and-white winter light; it impinges in ordered parallels on grey walls. The yellow does not hesitate, knows where it is going, has no doubts." (Mel Gooding, 'Yellow Pipes')

Gas PipesIoana Marinescu

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Exposure by elizabeth Gowing

We are the markmakers;we come here trailing muck and mists of our breath in the winter air.

Scuff and trodden dirt of shoe,scurf's blown highlights on dark-collared coats,umbrellas dripping braille by the door;

your fierce heels step andstop at every frame to form haiku on the floor;

across the gloss of cataloguesour hands spread smear and smudge,thumbnails ragged at edge of page.

We all bring our latent images - her lipsawait his cheek;his glass of wine, her lips;

girls' faces rouged to patching plaster,and plaster pocked and pickedto an image of a girl.

Light as the scribble of felt-tip pen,light is the frownline creasing as we squint; light is the crystalled silver halide stain;

it holds you here.Tread softly, feel yourself exploredin prints on snow.

elizabethgowing@hotmail.comwww.elizabethgowing.com

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Viewfinder Photography Gallery

Linear House,

Peyton Place, off royal Hill,

Greenwich, London Se10 8rS

www.viewfinder.org.uk