Rhiannon AdamMark Denton Fiona Harvey

Jonathan Illingworth Gavin Mecaniques

NoN/FIctIoN

Exhibition catalogue includes aninterviews with photographers

Photographs by:Rhiannon Adamrhiannon@rhiannonadam.com

Mark Dentonmark@mark-denton.com

Fiona Harveyfiona@willpwr.demon.co.uk

Jonathan Illingworthjonny67@live.co.uk

Gavin Mecaniquesgavin@mecaniques.co.uk Curated by:Kathleen Breykathleen@viewfinder.org.uk

Interviews by:Laura Berman lauraberman@live.co.uk

Kathleen Breykathleen@viewfinder.org.uk

Edited by:Kathleen Breykathleen@viewfinder.org.uk

Design by:Mandana Ahmadvazirdesigner@viewfinder.org.uk

Also available as a colour, e-publication:www.viewfinder.org.uk/shop

Published by:Viewfinder Photography Gallery52 Brixton VillageLondon SW9 8PS

www.viewfinder.org.uk

First published March 2011

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

Interview with:Rhiannon Adam(RA)Mark Denton(MD)Fiona Harvey(FH)Jonathan Illingworth(JI)Gavin Mecaniques(GM)by Laura Berman and Kathleen Brey

• How does the "real world" relate to your photographic practice? Do you create your own world to photograph or do you photograph that which already exists?

JI: the" real world" so far as I know has yet to be defined, empirically! Describing simpler forms of reality can be equally tricky. Whilst watching kids television with my two six year old girls I saw a man very, very below average height and stature step out from behind a curtain. this initially surprised and excited the two of them, which led to questions about the man. I replied with what I felt were adequate explanations. Having felt that this would be the end to childhood bafflement on this topic, the presenters with gushing adulation announced to the children in the audience and the folks at home that, “this man played R2D2 in the Star Wars movie!" My girls watched "the Empire Strikes Back" only two days prior at a friend’s house, so the robot character was still fresh in their forming minds. their heads turned back to me with looks of utter confusion at what they heard on the television. Before they could form a question I quickly responded, "yes he did, he was in Harry Potter as well." Satisfied with my casual reply and calm approach they turned back to the screen. I had smoothly avoided a lesson in semantics and normality resumed.

Sometimes it’s enough to go along with the flow of the subjective mind and wild theory, because over analysis kills emotional response and creativity. As long as a photographic practitioner is not completely lying to their audience, or if they inform the viewer of trickery - it’s part of the intention of the work. No serious insult to human sensibility is done. creative subjectivity plays a big part in the reality of human psychological behaviour.

MD: Domestic Fables is situated on the border between the ‘real’ and the imagined. the images are based on half-remembered episodes from my past and the journeys of imagination that I took as a child. they are part biography and part fantasy. For me, this is the area where photography has its greatest creative potential. Because a photograph can only picture what exists, the specific and the concrete, it has a natural affinity with the ‘real world’, with the indexical. And yet by making photographs of constructed, imagined scenes it is possible to imbue the things in your imagination with a separate life and reality all of their own. It’s as if I’m bringing parts of my imagination into existence, making them concrete, by way of photographing them. I’m making these (mis)memories and family mythologies explicit by means of photography; they are a way for me to explore and attempt to reconcile myself with my upbringing and my past via a blending of fact and fiction, history and fable.

RA: I shoot the world as it is, though in a sense I create my own world through the selective subject matter and style of my images.the use of Polaroid in my work is a testament to my love for the “real”. I shoot with Polaroid because each one is a physical relic, or souvenir of a place or

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moment. I can look at a view, line it up in my eyepiece, and hold a finished image in my hand of that same scene while I am still there. I really can take the experience of that moment with me wherever life flows.

A Polaroid also experiences the “real” in a very particular way. Unlike most other photographic practices, a Polaroid is intrinsically influenced by the conditions in which it was shot. A cold day will create a blue cast over the image, or a warm day will shift the colours towards yellows, and pinks. If it is windy and the picture vibrates in my hands before it is fully developed, small “trees” appear under the surface: stress points where the chemicals have refused to spread. If I am lucky, a stray grain of sand may embed itself into the surface of a wet picture, or a thumbprint may reveal itself in a corner. All of these are signs of that particular Polaroid being a one of a kind object, a “portrait” of a moment in all its eccentricities: a product of its environment as much as I am a product of mine. My Polaroids aim to capture the truth of a moment in time, without embellishments from post- processing, but instead carrying the scars of their birth.

FH: I am interested in how the world changes around us and how our relationship to it constantly shifts as we move through it. that is what I photograph. I do not construct another world in which to make my pictures. Because each image contains a reflection of the changes around me while I move, it acquires a dreamlike quality that is difficult to locate and identify. In that sense it is ‘my own world’ that I am photographing.

GM: In terms of photographic practice this is only one of many projects I'm working on. I also create portraiture of friends, performers and people of interest to me, and documentary projects, one example of which is called "last men standing" featuring the music and record sellers in and around Brixton. the "Waiting for the night to fall…" series came about as I have a friend Jules Newman, who makes quite beautiful theatre props and animal masks and I really wanted to work with her and see how far forward I could take my work. Rather than create something "otherworldly", I wanted to take these creations into the streets and side streets of London. then, as I had the opportunity, I took a world that already exists and skewed it. Being honest, the way the world is, it sometimes doesn't take much to do that.

• What is the narrative your photographic project aims to tell? Did your story evolve whilst pursuing the project?

JI: I hope the work reflects a gentle pathos and a bit of comedy that I feel when I view the world around me. Whether it is the day to day world of a donkey owner, the route I walk to work or the people that enter or neighbour my existence. I never go looking for a subject that is separate from my daily existence such as coral reef diving or cage fighting.

the donkeys neighbour my place of a work and my previous exhibition focused on the woodland I walked through to my place of work. Maybe the polemic of the work is my subjective belief that the humble can be as enigmatic as the grand or extreme things in life. I am aware that this idea may be oversaturated in the art world, but maybe if I throw the word "psychogeography" around, it might put a fresh spin on things.

MD: With these images, I was primarily interested in creating a psychological

effect, a mood, an emotional space, rather than a narrative per se. I want to create a space for the viewer in which their own imaginings and interpretations can take root. I want the viewer to bring their own narrative to the table when looking at the images; we do this all the time when we look at photographs because they’re so loosely coded, so open to interpretation. the images are also intended to be read individually as standalone tableaux. But having said that, there are a number of recurring visual motifs running throughout the series: they’re subtle but they’re in there. As the series progressed, I became aware that the more successful images were the ones which were more directly personal, more autobiographical, and so I decided to include members of my own family in the scenes.

RA: I don’t feel that these images aim to tell a story, but rather attempt to evoke a mood. My work is about our collective nostalgia for the past, both in terms of content and conception. they focus on human existence and interventions within landscapes, largely showing us as small insignificant ant-sized figures, as in a Lowry painting.

My process is constantly evolving as time passes, and personal memories and experiences shape shift to take on new meanings. this series of images is one that I have been working on for the last seven years so is constantly growing. the images in this exhibition are a small sample of the full collection, but I hope that these images are representative of the feeling of that the project aims to encapsulate.

I hope that the viewer will be able to feel some kind of warmth and familiarity within them, and take away a sense of yearning for a time when life was simple, our minds were clear and opportunities lay before us. I shoot in a way that means the images could be of any one’s life, and could be anywhere.

FH: Each blurred image contains an entire movement. the shutter is kept open for the time it takes to complete a step, a turn, a plié. the pictures were made in a dance studio with mirrored walls, so the image contains a reflection of the movement.

I use myself as model to keep the camera anchored to the body and move the surroundings relative to it. It constitutes an attempt to encapsulate the ever-changing relationship to the world around us in small, discrete pieces.this is an ongoing project and while the underlying aim has not changed, I am planning to widen its scope by working in different environments and using more mundane movements.

GM: I don't know if it's a narrative per se, and as the project evolved I wanted to leave as much open to the viewer as possible. I was interested in taking these animalistic and vaguely supernatural figures and then putting them on the street, in scenes that would make them look both larger and smaller than life, and to some extent possessed by human frailty and avarice. A world where Angela carter meets inner London. If even the Dardenne Brothers can make reference to Grimm's fairy tales, can't I do this?

• In producing this project did you explore an aspect of your own environment or personal story?

JI: Absolutely. Environment and the personal are entwined in this project. the environment is a unique space within the M25, it resembles more the outer

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fringes of our map of London. the area is partly protected charity farmland with green council spaces and private golf courses surrounding its central mass. Having grown up as a child in a mixture of urban space and green dwelling in the North, it goes right back to early memories. those memories influence my emotional responses and opinion of these places. there is a lot of theorizing on this kind of subjective mapping of places. Psychogeography is just one term that is developing theoretical recognition - but I’m unsure if my work fits into this model. See, I managed to mention psychogeography.

MD: the project is a blend of the biographical and the imagined. they stem from scenes that actually happened – or that I think may have happened – and they are taken directly from my own upbringing, my own history. Although the scenes are staged, I’m using my actual family members as models in the images. I’m interested in transforming my own familial environment – the house I grew up in – into a place of imagination and fantasy and as such it’s a very personal project which is closely bound to me and my history. they’re a blend of the autobiographical and the imagined.

RA: All of my work has autobiographical links in some way. Usually I shoot environments that were, once, familiar and everyday. these are places I lived for long periods, or locations that have strong family ties. Growing up, we rarely took photographs, and I traveled a lot. Photographing these places in my present day allows me to reappropriate memories and impressions of my past that are rapidly fading. I aim to photograph my ‘feeling’ for a place – the intangible sentimental relationship one has to a space, while being infected with all of the accumulated experience I have had since leaving.

the works on show here are products of my childhood spent growing up on a small boat crossing vast oceans – I am now land based and my work tries to capture some of the feeling of being the only sign of visible life for hundreds of miles. Sometimes we forget how small we are, and how much space is above and below us. I use a small format to show a big world.

FH: this project can be seen as an intimate exploration of my immediate environment over a short time period. However it is not the environment itself that interests me, rather my relationship to it in physical terms.there is a link to the personal through the use of dance movements because I love dance and it has been an important motif throughout my life. one of the reasons I find dance so interesting is because of the way the body threads itself through space. So there is a definite performative element to the work, and I want to make this relate to the ‘performance’ that each of us does as we make our way through the world.

GM: on one level I was curious about urban exploration, in spite of how much of London is now sealed off, hyper-regulated and surveilled, while in turn so much of the city and its buildings are now just derelict. I should mention I also had many kind friends assisting me, even as my plans grew more complex and ambitious, and to whom I am indebted.

• Has your previous photography or explorations led you to making this series of images? What were your sources of inspiration?

JI: Most of my work has centred around returning to old haunts or retacing familiar routes or places. I have only once tackled a subject knowingly outside my own personal experience or routine: paintballers, and it was

probably the weakest work I have ever done. Although it was probably the most amusing photographic experience I have ever had. this ill-fated project culminated with the head coach of a famous rugby league club threatening to find me and "do me in" if I published pictures of him and the squad on a morale building exercise at the paintball venue without his consent.

I take inspiration from many photographers - hopefully you can spot them in my work. Reading, reading and more reading of whatever takes your fancy always helps when photographic blockages occur. Most recently the paintings of George Shaw, a contemporary artist, have inspired me to pursue a passion to review the familiar in ones life. Is he a psychogeographer? Maybe we all are.

MD: the series is a departure from my usual practice in that it is much more constructed than my other portrait-based work. these other projects are very much about the exploring the relationship between me and the sitter. However, these earlier projects explored similar issues of belonging, of family and community, and were very much concerned with the creation of a visual index of the psychological connections I had with the people I was photographing. As Domestic Fables developed it became clear that I was actually exploring theses same issues but via a different, more constructed mode of working. I’d looked at the work of Doug Dubois, who restaged moments and episodes involving his parents in ‘All the Days and Nights.’ I was always aware of Larry Sultan and tina Barney’s work which was also centred on the familial and domestic spaces. And I was inspired in part by Bachelard’s notion of ‘an architecture of the imagination’ in ‘the Poetics of Space’ in which the spaces of the house are mapped onto psychological or emotional states.

RA: I am inspired by the locations I visit or have visited, and so in a way all of my previous explorations have led me here. My compulsive nature and love of collecting and assembling memorabilia has probably had a large part to play in my love for Polaroids - I collect them like some people collect coins, stamps or tourist trinkets.

I am spurred by real life, and patterns of human behavior. But overwhelmingly, I am influenced by the nature of the of Polaroid medium itself. Polaroid film is like a physical equivalent of memory, which changes, evolves, decays and adapts as time passes, and it is these film characteristics that particularly lend themselves to the task of recording the fading past.

FH: this work is a natural progression from my earlier projects. the theme which connects all of them is an interest in the significant factors underlying everyday life, factors which often remain hidden or unnoticed. For example, earlier series considered the multiplicity of products that we use everyday derived from crude oil. Another series examined the world of electronic components that are part of so many ubiquitous devices: cars, phones, washing machines, planes etc. these factors interest me because if they were to suddenly stop or become unavailable our lives would change dramatically. thus moving through space without a learned spatial map continually provided by our senses would be very difficult.

GM: I just thought to myself Gregory crewdson isn't allowed to have all the fun. I could also mention many others e.g. Anton corbijn and even Weegee.I'm originally from a film background and the visual art of cinematography

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is something I love very much. Photography appeals by virtue of making the path from idea to delivery that much more achievable. It would be interesting to continue that full circle, though I want to think carefully about my approach as a photographic artist and my technique as I go on.

• Do you think the medium of photography lends itself to expressing narratives? Is photography truthful or misleading?

JI: Yes I believe photography lends itself to expressing narratives, whether they be short stories or narratives developed over time, much like poems or essays. Do I think photography is truthful or misleading? All I can suggest is read some Friedrich Nietzsche on the subject of truth. By the end you won’t even trust your own mother - never mind photography!

MD: I think that photography is always misleading in the sense that it is always the result of personal or subjective decisions on the part of the photographer. I don’t think that it can ever be truthful in a strictly objective or impartial sense. But I do think that photography can function as a vehicle for the expression of a personal vision - a subjective and personal truth. In these images my goal is to convey a psychological ‘truth,’ rather than an ontological or documentary one.

the issue of narrative in photography is a central one for me and I have mixed feelings about it. on the one hand, because the medium is so descriptive and so particular, it has the ability to instantly and powerfully evoke a specific situation in a way that mediums like painting or poetry cannot. But at the same time it’s this very specificity and precision that makes it harder for photography to talk about wider, more abstract ideas. I’m talking here about the single image on the gallery wall. I think that photography tends to do narrative much better when its part of a series. I recently re-read John Gossage’s ‘the Pond,” and that’s a great example of how a series of photographs can begin to express a deeper, more subtle narrative or set of ideas. I think that the photobook, rather than the gallery wall is where the narrative possibilities of the medium are most often able to come to the fore.

RA: Photography itself is too wide a term to limit easily. clearly the ideas of truth versus lies in photography have changed dramatically since the advent of digital photography, and easy access to retouching. there are also myriad convoluted arguments for both sides – any creative process isby definition, subjective.

the difference today is that any kind of photograph can be “creative” even though it presents itself as fact. A photograph, for instance, used to be reliable evidence. It was real life recorded. Painting was the artistic process and photography was its more objective little sister. the boundaries between fact and fiction are constantly softening.

As recently as the 1980’s and 1990’s, people in middle America were trying to prove the existence of UFos with photographic evidence. these days anyone can manipulate an image with minimal knowledge and the photograph is discredited, it is no longer any kind of proof. We look at glossy magazines and instead of commenting on how wonderful someone looks, we say how talented the retoucher must have been.

My choice to shoot on Polaroid is tied to this idea of a photograph as truth,

and I refuse to shoot digitally because to me, it is soulless. I cannot bear the idea of people viewing my work and not trusting that what I show is real. these days an image is finished only once it has been imported in Photoshop and edited, whereas my photographs are made with real chemical and light, on location with no editing. What you see here is what I held in my hand, and you see what I saw. A Polaroid cannot be faked, and you can see here that each one is an original one-off.

For many years I shot on in-date film, whereas these days this is not an option – all the film I shoot on is outdated stock. this has given rise to a new way of working where my work is a collaboration between my eye, the scene at hand and the unknown qualities of the expired film. this has a huge impact on my work, and what I can and cannot shoot. outdated film creates strange effects, but these scars and streaks are the death cries of analogue photography floundering in a sea of digital binary numbers and megabytes. All of the flaws and failings you see here are real, and by having errors in my images, I again prove that no editing has taken place.

Photographs are still moments suspended in time, but hint at what came before and what came afterward. I try to turn this on its head and create single moments of beauty which do not rely on a story. they are like paintings that mean different things to different people. My work encourages interpretation. I don’t want to tell you a narrative, I want to give you the tools to interpret your own story, to lay claim to my images and make them your own.

FH: the kind of performance photography shown in this series regains more of the sense of experience lost to the static image. the success of photography in telling a story has two sides to it: the photographer can only go so far, beyond which the viewer has to be willing and/or able to read the narrative. there is little doubt that the narrative quality of photography is the main reason for the development of photojournalism. But those pictures almost always need supporting textual information, whereas the images in this series contain more in terms of impressionistic detail: soft colours, the just-visible human figure which draws the viewer in to look further.

GM: I think the act of opening your eyes lends itself to creating narrative. call it the tyranny of the hero's journey if you like. A need for structured storytelling is built into our brains, similar, in a sense, to the basic ability to construct and understand forms of symbolic logic, representation and interaction.

As mentioned I wanted to leave the meaning open to the viewer, but inevitably one starts to fill in the gaps. At one point, rather than call them after their respective animals I joked I was going to call them after high street banks, however amusing, would have been fairly limiting. on another note I remembered an Aldous Huxley quote where he said that if you didn't have a theory of the subconscious you would have to invent superstition in order to try to understand the world. Perhaps I'm just trying to square that circle.Is photography truthful or misleading? that's not for me to answer. Is life truthful or misleading?

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Rhiannon Adam

I am a Polaroid photographer originally hailing from county cork in Ireland, later traveling the world on a boat for seven years, before settling in London. It was this period of nomadic journeying with my parents aboard our small boat, Jannes, that stands as the biggest influence on my artistic practice and subject matter. All of my work is shot with a range of Polaroid cameras, using expired films and natural light.

My work is largely autobiographical in nature, largely featuring human interventions within landscapes. I concentrate on the subjective and selective nature of individual memories in the context of the temporal and factual nature of photography. My work makes use of Polaroid images for their nostalgic and tangible qualities, creating a range of photographs that are in fact objects – or ‘souvenirs’ created on location. these images contain no post-production and are all one-off, never to be repeated. they are little pieces of “truth”. though these images are unmodified, each is shot on expired film that often yields unexpected effects. the medium itself thus reflects the process of memory, where pieces are lost in time, and there are factual errors and flaws.

Much of my work is created around personally significant places that I revisited. I revisit these places after many years of absence and select spaces within that location that represent my relationship to it, both in the past and present. Normally these spaces invoke emptiness and tranquility – mirroring one’s abstract, evolving relationship to the past.

Each image is thus a collaborative process – between real memories, memories that have adapted and changed over the years, and the warmth and haze of nostalgic remembrances. Without the hard caste of a digital image, or even the factual distance of a 35mm shot, these Polaroids could be of any one’s memory of place. they are tiny blank canvasses which the viewer is encouraged to claim ownership. they are memories for all, suspended in time. the use of the Polaroid imbues the work with a kind of honesty, directness and familiarity that stands in direct contrast to the digital image which appears distant and impersonal.

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Mark Denton

Domesic Fables

Domestic Fables is an investigation of the domestic space as a place of fiction and ritual. I am interested in using photography to visually reformulate the familiar and mundane confines of the domestic environment in which 'home' becomes transformed from a place of prosaic safety, comfort and familiarity into a locus of disquiet, disruption and unexpected encounter.

The project centres on the creation of staged tableaux using members of my family to enact constructed scenes set in and around my own and my familial homes. These tableaux are derived in part from my memories and the journeys of imagination I took as a child growing up in what I felt was a stifling and overwhelmingly anodyne environment. Part biographical and part imagined, they are a way for me to explore and attempt to reconcile myself with my upbringing and my past. It is photography as a process of psychological excavation, a form of therapy, a way of visualising and giving shape to partially hidden and half-glimpsed memories and experiences: a blending of fact and fiction, history and fable.

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Fiona Harvey

My work contemplates and comments upon unnoticed but important everyday things. the images are from an ongoing project which muses upon our relationship to the world around us, and how that changes each time we make even a simple movement. We take a step forward or turn around and our connection to the space we occupy alters drastically. the long exposures record what happens around us during those basic movements, and show the surroundings from a multiplicity of angles, the resulting sensory overload producing abstract images.

Perhaps these images are a reflection on what has happened in our world. Has the amount of information we are each presented with every day increased so much that it becomes hard to disentangle its components?

A photograph from this series was awarded the Photography Prize in the UK-Japan Art Design & Film Awards 2010.

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Jonathan Illingworth

As I'm led to believe it, the son of God was carried not once but twice on the back of a donkey!

How do I know this? Because Jesus told me so? Well, Not yet.

Umberto Eco wrote," throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived. Sometimes we look for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, or for our own personal story ( which we tell our confessor or our analyst, or which we write in a diary). Sometimes our personal story coincides with the story of the universe."

over great lengths of time fictions have been born into facts, facts died into fiction - or should the sentence be the other way round?

I am a photography enthusiast with leanings towards art or maybe not. I’m a art enthusiast, with leanings towards photography. Maybe - I’m unsure.

My projects are produced because of various reasons, economics - I don’t have enough money to finance expensive projects. Sociological - I’m a Dad of three children; class - Northern industrial stock; race - tolerated enough to hang out with the fringe of white society. Health, weather and sexuality all contribute to the work that is created behind the lens.

one defining factor that really interests me is geography, the relationship between immediate, familiar and daily surroundings married with my psychological world.

Back to the donkey, who exist neighbourly on a patch of ground right next to my place of work. over the years I have photographed them, and on certain occasions fed and watered them. I photographed the donkeys to the extent that I felt I was no longer photographing them, but really was photographing myself!

As a subject they became a mini essay or an exercise in documentation. the donkeys allowed me to take liberties in defining their meaning and express emotions. Sometimes it was playful, other times serious, as I was beginning to suspect that ultimately the only the subject I could explore in meaningful truth was myself.

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Gavin Mecaniqueswww.mecaniques.co.uk

"Waiting for the night to fall" Excerpt.

RabbitStagRabbit and Hare

Prints from a 6 month collaboration between photographer Gavin Mecaniques and designer and props maker Jules Newman, taken during day and night explorations of urban London.

Models :Jamie Facemite , Lola Sparkle, Michael Lloyd @ Fish Island, Hackney Wick.

Additional help and thanks:Dashee La Maquilleuse, Make up and Hair ArtistJamie Facemite Pheme FilmsPhotofusion Ltd Brixton

Further information:http://www.facebook.com/#!/ghouliaspeculiars

Viewfinder Photography Gallery

52 Brixton Village

London SW9 8PS

www.viewfinder.org.uk