when is a photography gallery not a photography gallery?

I travelled down to Plymouth last Friday, to take part in – well, I’m not sure what it was really, and the event was all the better for that.  It was organised by geographers Caitlin DeSilvey and James Ryan with photographer Steven Bond, as part of their Small is Beautiful? research project, and it was held at the South West Image Bank.  What was so interesting for me was that, in previewing the event, I was pretty sure I knew the kind of thing it would be; and I was almost completely mistaken.

So, Caitlin had told me that there would be a discussion of the photographs that Steven had been taking as part of the Small is Beautiful? project, which is looking at “the material cultures associated with the making and mending of everyday objects in the South West of England, to quote its blog.  She kindly sent me a sneak preview of the photographs on a cd, and a pdf of the folded leaflet that would be given to visitors as they looked at the photos in the gallery.  The photographs are really striking.  Grouped in sets of three around themes such as “patina”, “landscapes” and “together”, they are fairly small but rigorously composed, rather abstract and in beautiful colour; as Jo in the discussion said, some of them were so seductive that they made her want to jump into what was pictured.

So, quite formally composed, abstracted photographs; accompanied by equally lyrical but rather cool text (to me, anyway); shown in a gallery with white walls and free wine and nibbles.  As I jotted down things I might say in the discussion, I focussed on the formal qualities of the images, the leaflet and the gallery space.  I was all ready to explore the interesting tension between the mess pictured in the photographs and the artfulness of the photographs, and to discuss whether the former made the latter look like work too, or if the latter made the former too artful.  That is, I was ready with the sort of formalist reading that white gallery spaces tend to induce.

But I never got a chance to talk about that.  The discussion of the exhibition – with James, Caitlin and Steven, plus a me and a couple of other visitors, and a couple of people who volunteered at the Image Bank – took off in a completely different direction.  The photographs acted as a brilliant and provocative springboard for some very vigorous discussion of the decline of craft skills and local shops prepared to sell one washer and a couple of nails; of the importance of emotion, particularly family feeling, to both the crafts pictured and the research project; and to the wider cultural and economic changes that threatened so many making and mending (work)shops now.  The discussion hovered around the photos like a hawk, sometimes quite distant from their visible content (at least as I saw them), and at other times swooping down into very specific discussions of the details of specific images.  And we were all fascinated by  the mounting of the photographs, which turned out to be bits of shower fitting stuck with velcro onto the walls; and the photos themselves, which were printed onto metal plates so that you could actually pick them up in the gallery and feel their weight (though you still had to wear gloves… even so, a pretty unusual experience).  The printing process had slightly cropped Steve’s images too.

Even though I frequently argue that just as important as the visual content of an image are the circumstances of its viewing, I am still surprised at that discussion, with its intense interest in the photographs generated for reasons entirely different from the usual engagement with images in galleries – which is, as Charlotte Klonk notes in her history of such spaces, about feeling an “experience”.  At the Image Bank last Friday, there was plenty of experiencing, but in the relation between the photographs and a very informed engagement with a specific, local material culture.  The white walls didn’t seem to matter, much, for a couple of hours.  It will be fascinating to see how the project’s other planned events also create new spaces for discussion and audiencing.

Klonk, C. (2009) Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000. London: Yale University Press.

a new sort of research film?

Since my visit to Queen Mary a few weeks ago, I’ve continued to ponder about the use of films as a social science research strategy.  A conversation with my colleague Bradon Smith provoked the idea that when most of us see a film (anthropologists excepted, perhaps), we watch it comparing it to the films we see elsewhere, on tv or at the cinema.  So we expect it to have high production values; we expect it to be filmed and edited very skilfully; we expect eloquent voice-overs and carefully-chosen music; we expect a beginning, a middle and an end; we expect to watch it concentrating on it and it alone; and we expect it to speak for itself, that is, we expect to ‘get’ it just by watching it.

Clearly, those are exceptionally high standards for your average academic to achieve, if they haven’t gone to film school or studied visual anthropology.  In the age of YouTube, iMovie and smartphones, maybe we should rethink those expectations and in so doing invent a new kind of film genre which fits both the changed contexts in which films can now be made, distributed and viewed.

So here is a list of possibilities for making and watching a new kind of social science film now:

• the film should be very clear what it’s trying to do.  This may involve a long title and probably a voice-over too.
• the film should have been made using a tripod and a videocamera with a decent external microphone, but don’t expect panoramavision with surroundsound.  It will probably have been edited using software from Apple or Microsoft, so again, make allowances.
• the film might well be pretty short, say ten minutes, so it can be uploaded to a video-sharing website and an academic webpage.  But there could be a series of films to be watched.
• online screening means that you can read some stuff about the film too; its paratext could, and perhaps probably will, be be lot more extensive than the posters and reviews that we’re used to.  In fact, I think this is really important for a film that wants to make a social-scientific argument/statement; I think viewers need to be told explicitly what the film is trying to say.
• online distribution will affect the spaces in which it’s seen.  This will probably no longer be the darkened lecture theatre – though it may be – but it might also be screened on a smartphone.  This means its visual scale might be quite crude: simple, uncluttered images work better on small screens.  (I remember after I watched Essential Killing thinking that it would look fine on an iPad: all those shots of one man in various landscapes).
• online distribution could also allow audiences to leave comments, for future viewers to see as part of watching the film.  The commenting would also be part of the film’s paratext.

So, a film in this new genre might well be fairly small, watched in chunks, accompanied by other materials, and a little rough around the edges; and it would include a fair bit of voice, either written or spoken, some of which would be outwith the film text itself.

The only thing is, I don’t know any films being made like that.  Does anyone else?

on not remembering the name of the novel you’re reading…

Ok, so I’ve confessed to reading George RR Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire books.  The thing is, I can never remember either his name, or the title of the book I’m reading (just started the third).  Why?

Is it because they’re not the sort of books I usually read?  It’s not only the genre – fantasy – but also the style of writing.  They spin a very compelling narrative thread, there are some amazing imagined places (I’ve not seen the HBO tv series but would love to see how it imagines the ice Wall) and some great characters – Tyrion makes me laugh out loud – but they’re certainly not great Literature; descriptions are repeated, phrasings are clunky, and there’s rather too many glistening manhoods for my taste.  So am I just too much of a snob to want to remember who wrote them or what they’re called?

No, I tell myself.  Actually, it’s because I’ve been reading them on an ebook device, a Kindle to be precise.  And with ebooks you just don’t get the front cover experience.  Don’t get me wrong, I really like my Kindle; it’s very easy to use, very portable, and I’ve read more books in the five months I’ve had it than in the previous three years, I reckon (for some reason downloading an ebook is easier than shelling out in a bookshop, maybe because the choice of what to read doesn’t feel so overwhelming).  But what I do miss with my Kindle is that front cover.  Where’s the author’s name every time you decide to read?  Where’s the title?  Where are the carefully chosen image and typeface, signalling genre so clearly?  The Kindle doesn’t show them every time you start to read a book; instead, it opens the book at the page you last looked at.  Very helpful for continuing to read; but not so good at letting you remember just what it is you’re reading…

‘Visual Methodologies’, again

I wrote the first draft of my book Visual Methodologies very quickly – it took about six months, all in all, working in the National Library of Scotland from the outline of a course I’d been teaching on interpreting visual materials at Edinburgh University’s Social Sciences Graduate School.  I’ve just received the proofs of the third edition, which will be out from Sage in November 2011.  Given that this third edition still contains some of the text of the first edition, I guess I could say that the third edition has taken over a decade to write…

So what’s changed?  Well,  quite a lot.  There’s a fair bit now on digital media, for example, although the book is still organised around methods, not media.  There’s bits on online gaming, and YouTube, and digital photography; I found very useful essays on Wii Fit, and on World of Warcraft.  And I worked my way through some of the recent work on affect, or on what Nigel Thrift calls the nonrepresentational.  Although that’s not a term that seems to have spread much beyond Thrift’s own discipline of geography, it was useful to me revising the book because the first and second editions (and the third, still) start with a long quotation from Stuart Hall about representation.  The third edition delves a bit into the posthuman (with Katherine Hayles) and the affective (with Mark Hansen and Laura Marks).  But with the affective,  a funny thing happened: the most recent theory seemed to offer a return to some very traditional methods.  Both Hansen and Marks visit art galleries and watch videos, and theorise about what visual objects do from how they make them feel.  Which seemed to me to be rather similar to how many commentators have defined – and condemned – connoisseurship as an approach to images.  How odd, I thought.  Comforting, then, to find Ruth Leys arguing something similar recently (and thanks to Clive Barnett for alerting me to her essay).

The third edition still has huge gaps, of course.  There’s nothing on graphic novels, for example, though I always browse the ones my son brings home from libraries.  I’d like to read more of Neil Gaiman’s work, for one.  I first came across his writing in a book for young children called Wolves in the Walls, with wonderful illustrations by Dave McKean; a young girl hears noises coming from the walls of her family’s house, and the darkly obscure images perfectly capture the possibility that she might really be hearing wolves living in the gaps between the house’s walls.  (There are wolves there, of course.)  Gaiman’s recent episode of the tv series Dr Who was fantastic too, I thought.  There’s remarkably little academic work on how visuals and text work together in graphic novels (or cartoons, come to that).  If I had time, though, I’d love to think about how the graphic novel might work as an analytic tool for visual methods researchers.  I think visual methods for social science researchers just have to have some text, to anchor what the researcher wants to convey (as much as meaning and effect can be anchored); the graphic novel seems to be a genre that can do that effectively because it explicitly depends on both images and text (unlike photographs, some sorts of which apparently don’t need captions).

One thing I hardly changed for the third edition, though, was the chapter on psychoanalysis and film theory.  Freud and Lacan have been routed by Deleuze in film theory land, it seems (sorry – I’m finding myself strangely addicted to George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books at the moment and I’m seeing castles and battles everywhere); but I still think the attention Freud paid to human subjectivity remains an extraordinarily valuable project.