A short round up of a week in The Big Society

Following the opening of his Bank Street Arts exhibition of The Big Society- ‘A document of the credit crunch. A visual riposte to Cameron’s imagined nation and a critique of the voodoo economics which took Britain to the edge of moral and financial calamity’- Si Barber was in Sheffield for a week of activities in support of the show. These included lectures and Q&A sessions at Rotherham College, Sheffield Hallam University, Norton College, as well as a discussion group with PhD students from Sheffield University. In this short clip, from Si’s session at Norton College, he talks about caravans, flags, holidays, Sarah Ferguson, the English psychological state, and Britain’s imperial past:

The Open College of the Arts recorded this excellent audio interview, and Si has included a BBC Radio Sheffield interview about the exhibition on his blog. The Leeds-based Culture Vulture ran this article, which notes that the show’s ‘honest, raw imagery highlights the differences between how we live, and how we think we live.’ Not all feedback was so positive, and one of the more critical comments that sticks out from the college lectures was that the project was ‘cynical and exploitative’. Come and find out for yourself. Bank Street Arts is open until 17th December when it closes for the holidays and reopens in early Jan, when the show continues until 13th January.

Copies of Si’s The Big Society book and exclusive prints are available from Bank Street Arts’ shop and also via Si’s site.

“Building a big society that will take power away from politicians and give it to people”?

Next Tuesday 15th November sees the opening of Si Barber‘s The Big Society exhibition that I’m curating at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield. The show runs until January 2012 and includes more than 40 photographs from Si’s independently-produced book of the same name, some of which I’m delighted to say are exclusive to the Bank Street Arts show. This is just a few of the images that will be featured:

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The catalyst for the project, which examines the inherent problems and contradictions of the coalition government’s intention to build ‘a big society that will take power away from politicians and give it to people’, came as Si ’was listening to the radio when Prime Minister David Cameron was describing the way he wanted to reshape Britain. I found his nostalgia for the certainties of his privileged upbringing quite sinister really. It reminded me of an Enid Blyton story.’

Si will be in Sheffield for a few days to give lectures and take part in workshops with local colleges and universities, culminating in an open afternoon at Bank Street Arts on Friday 18th November. This will run from 3-7pm and anybody with an interest in the project is very welcome to come along and talk to Si about the exhibition and his work on The Big Society.

If you follow either my Twitter feed or Bank Street Arts’ you’ll have the opportunity to win a signed copy of The Big Society book, plus find out about the related projects we’ll be rolling out at Bank Street over the coming months.

Lost and Found in America

Lenny Gottlieb’s sublime Lost and Found in America is a book that few of the amateur photographers featured could have imagined happening as they fumbled with their point-and-shoot instamatics in the autumn of 1968. Gottlieb worked at a processing lab in Boston and had the vision to rescue over 30,000 photographs that had been marked as ‘rejects, destined for the trash’ as Andrew Roth, who staged an exhibition of 500 images from Gottlieb’s collection, puts it.

The book is filled with the sort of sweetly intimate, technically clumsy fragments of home life that have come to define the family snapshot as a photographic genre; the collection’s impact heightened by the knowledge that the factory’s quality control staff, ‘making their choices about focus and exposure… carrying out their own personal censorship of the memories and moments of others’, had dismissed everything here as being unfit to be returned to their owners:

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The book has an extra resonance in that the photographs are presented against the backdrop of the war raging in Vietnam and ‘the violence that flickered on our TV screens’. It’s an interesting, ambitious way of framing the collection, creating a stark contrast to the scenes depicted. Aesthetically, in the context of the current vogue for the retro-hip of expired film, toy cameras, light leaks, and chemical burns, a number of the collection’s photographs resonate with the sort of nostalgic, ethereal beauty that now comes as standard with iPhone camera apps.

As 21st century life becomes ever-more subject to photographic documentation it’s interesting to see how a previous generation responded to innovations in mass market photography, both in terms of how the elements within the frame were staged and arranged, and what was seen as being worthy of photographing- amongst the images of family celebrations and days basking in the early autumn sunshine are scenes of random everyday activity that, viewed without any contextual frame of reference, seem positively loopy to modern eyes. Gottlieb’s inspired sequencing of the images weaves a narrative thread that accentuates this, subtly and cleverly guiding the viewer through a unique collection, drawing parallels between the forces of global politics and details of everyday life.

Lost and Found in America is available through the peerless Dewi Lewis Publishing.

PushPull: a photography slideshow night in Sheffield

With artist and photographer Jessa Fairbrother I’ve been organising PushPull, a photography slideshow evening that’s going to be starting next month and running alternately at S1 Artspace and Bank Street Arts in Sheffield. Anyone who wants to gorge themselves on a diverse selection of photography slideshows from around the world is welcome to attend. We’ve already got some fabulous work in the pipeline to screen and are very open to further suggestions- feel free to contact us at pushpullphoto[at]gmail[dot]com.

Our first night is on Thursday 20th October, kicking off at 7pm, and will be taking place at Bank Street Arts. The second session will be at S1 Artspace on Thursday 24th November. Admission is free.

Photographers and/ or curators interested in screening their work at PushPull can find further details here.

PushPull is also on Facebook and on Twitter.

Surface Tension in Sheffield

10 photographs from the Surface Tension series are being exhibited at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield this September as part of my residency at the centre. The show opens on Fri 2nd Sept and will run until the 30th.

Clicking here takes you to a slideshow of the series. The music featured is by Richard Dooley and Philip Jones. You can download it here.

www.andrewconroy.info

Surviving the Will of the Powerful

In the introduction to his book The Big Society: Snapshots of 21st Century Britain, photographer Si Barber notes that ‘The notion that humanity is subservient to the market is so huge and all-encompassing it appears to be part of the natural order.’  The fallout of this notion is made all too apparent in the photographs that follow, which manage to examine the everyday effects of the recession with equal parts outrage, compassion, warmth, and wry humour.

If you’re in Sheffield between November and January you’ll be able to see for yourself- Si has very kindly agreed to exhibit photographs from the book at Bank Street Arts. Below are just a few of the 40-odd images that we’re putting together for the show, which I’m very pleased to note will also include a number of new, previously unseen photographs:

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Si will be coming to Sheffield to do a Q&A session about The Big Society and there’ll be a series of related events to tie in with the show. Details are tbc, and the best way to find out about where and when and everything will be happening is to follow me on Twitter.

As well as being a timely piece of work given the recent unrest in England’s cities, The Big Society is also testament to one photographer’s determination to bring his vision to the wider world: not only has The Big Society been an enormously labour-intensive project for Si, he also produced and self-published the book that the exhibition is based on through his own Eye Ludicrous imprint. Click here to buy a copy for the outrageously decent price of 12 quid.

Follow Si on Twitter here and view his website here. You can also read an interview he gave about The Big Society here.

I Am Karen: re-interpreted

An exhibition of Sabine Dundure‘s photographs of the Sheffield Karen community is taking place at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield this September. The photographs will be accompanied by transcripts of Sabine’s conversations with her subjects, reflecting on their experiences both back home and in the UK.

I Am Karen has been exhibited before in Sheffield, at the Creative Spark event during summer 2011. The Bank Street show differs in that it will feature 6 curator’s texts produced by a group of Bank Street’s resident artists, hence the ‘re-interpreted’ subtitle. The texts will be expanded throughout the show’s duration, and one will feature a conversation Sabine and I had about her work on the project.

The show runs from Tues 6th September to Fri 30th September. More information and details of the residents involved can be found here.

Surface Tension

www.andrewconroy.info

I really really really really really really really really enjoyed it

Feedback from some of the Sheffield schoolchildren who took part in Photo Finish earlier this summer:

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Photographs that the children took are on display until the middle of this month at Bank Street Arts, the Winter Garden, Ponds Forge, and Sheffield Cathedral.

Exploring Photography in Nottingham

From October I’m delivering Exploring Photography, a 10 week short course at Nottingham Trent University that’ll be less about showing people one end of a camera from the other as initiating and supervising weekly projects for photographers to challenge themselves with.

Each of the sessions will run for two and half hours. The first part will be spent looking at and discussing a particular area of photography- street photography and minimalism, for instance, but these are by no means set in stone and the course will be shaped by the interests of those who sign up to it. The rest of the session will then be focused on organising a practical assignment to be worked on independently over the course of the following week, and then assessing everybody’s images from the previous week.

Exploring Photography‘s emphasis is very much on the creative rather than the technical, and taking part in the course is really just a matter of you having access to a reasonable digital camera- not even necessarily a dSLR- and some understanding of transferring images to a computer, tweaking them in processing software, and uploading them to the net. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re fairly new to photography or have been shooting for some time- the main aim of the course is to provide an accessible and supportive environment where photographers can develop their ideas and participate in discussions around lens culture.

You can sign up to the course here and by all means drop me an email at andrewdconroy[at]yahoo.co.uk if you want to know more.

Photo Finish: under starter’s orders

In May and June I worked on Photo Finish, a photography and sports project for primary school children initiated by the Sheffield Children’s Festival that tied into my residency at Bank Street Arts.

Unlike a more conceptual children’s photography project I worked on last year, Photo Finish featured a heady cocktail of adrenalin, sweat, ear-splitting noise, and children instinctively photographing rapidly moving subject matter with very basic compact cameras. It also involved working with sufficiently large numbers of children to require the involvement of two assistant photographers- the unflappable Sabine Dundure and Tim Logan- to guide the children, help manage the sessions, and process a dauntingly high volume of photographs.

From 21st June, photographs that the children took are being displayed in venues around Sheffield, including Bank Street Arts, the Winter Garden, Ponds Forge, and Sheffield Cathedral. This is a handful of them:

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As well as demonstrating the liberating creative effects digitisation has had on photography, Photo Finish also underlined just how instinctively children are able to get to grips with technology. Each session kicked off with a short introduction that outlined the absolute fundamentals of photography before each child then had just 30 minutes to document the sporting activities in front of them. Some of the children who took part in the project were as young as 6 years old, yet were very quickly able to respond to an extremely challenging set of tasks.

More schools photography projects at Bank Street Arts are currently being developed. Contact me at andrewdconroy[at]yahoo.co.uk for more details.

You can download a brochure with details of all this year’s Sheffield Children’s Festival’s projects here.

www.andrewconroy.info