Interview by Maja Lorkowska. Twitter: @MajaLorkowska.

It’s the last few weeks of ‘ Open 3: Affecting Change‘ at Open Eye Gallery, so if you need any more reasons to come along, we reveal a little bit more about some of the work on display. One of the projects that forms part of the exhibition is a collaboration between photographer Yetunde Adebiyi and Between the Borders. The project explores contemporary migration and movement through three activities: producing a zine, protesting against the conditions of detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre and organising parties that provide a safe and inclusive space for both UK citizens and people seeking asylum or refuge in the UK.

Maja Lorkowska, writer, met with Yetunde and party-organisers Adam Nazem and Theo Temple to talk a little bit about the photographs and the events that led to their creation.

The parties started as a way of raising money for S.T.A.R. – Student Action for Refugees, and continued due to their popularity and the organisers’ desire to stay involved in helping organisations like Asylum Link and Calais Migrant Solidarity. Through the parties, Yetunde Adebiyi became involved with Between The Borders, a collective that provides a platform for the creative expression of new migrants and asylum seekers. They publish a zine, organise workshops and host events that provide an open forum for people with and without UK citizenship.

From making friends for life to making political statements, all three say that it really was just ‘a damn good party’. Thanks to Adebiyi’s watchful gaze, we can now see some of their experiences caught on film.   

ML: Where did the idea for the parties come from?

AN: We don’t really have an answer for this… We met at university. The year that we started putting on parties was the year that I became politicised; it was the year that I found out that my mum was a refugee. I got interested in Asylum Link Merseyside and refugee health, because I work in healthcare.

Theo took me to a party once, a reggae party at this old warehouse, and I really liked the space. This was about six or seven years ago. We had this inkling that we wanted to put on our own party.

ML: Tell me about what the vibe was like, how did you make it welcoming for everyone? How did you promote it?

TT: We created Facebook events and had paper invitations that we’d design up – I think the invitations were quite important. We didn’t give them out to people we didn’t know but we actually invited people rather than just give them away. There were quite a lot of people who came randomly too.

AN: We just really didn’t want it to be gimmicky. We wanted it to speak for itself and have people judge it for themselves. And that’s why we didn’t give it a name. And because it’s always been free entry for asylum seekers and refugees, we wanted them to have a lot of ownership of the parties. We tried to make the music as inclusive as possible as well, with lots of different genres. There were the non-music activities too, like film projections upstairs.

TT: I guess it was a party which reached out to people. Sometimes there were a lot of people who came from Asylum Link too and many are still friends now. It was like an extra place to hang out, not just a party space where you’re dancing but also a place where you can just hang out. That’s just the architecture of the place.

AN: It just makes it safe, a little bit enclosed. Usually, at parties if you want to be away from the party, you have to go out and have a smoke. I don’t even smoke! So I know lots of people would come to the party and not even dance, but just spend time together.

ML: Did the parties come before your political idea?

AN: Still, even now, I don’t a clear political outlook that informs things that I do artistically. That was just a little factor, that maybe influenced the things I was interested in, because at the time, in terms of nightlife, I didn’t really particularly enjoy going out that much. There was one night, which was so good it unlocked a crazy dancing machine in me (laughter) so I wanted to replicate that.

ML: What were people’s responses?

AN: There has been a variety of responses, just as you would get from any event. Some people were really committed, came every time.

TT: Some people came every now and again. We were all students too and lot of people weren’t from Liverpool, so it was interesting having students and refugees, both not from Liverpool, everyone still getting to know the city through parties.

AN: I think dancing together crazily, and seeing people who don’t know each other do that together; you’d see some people going really mad, and that’s a cool feeling.

TT: Or people showing each other dance moves from their country, that was the best thing to see. Personally I associate with that Palestinian dancing, it’s kinda like Cossack dancing. I remember once there was just a dance song playing and people all started doing this Cossack move and that was brilliant.

ML: So, how did the photos fit into this?

YA: I think looking at it now the photos are a lot more representative of what it became. In a positive way! Not that it had changed from a horrible experience to a really good one, but I just mean…

TT: I guess we did get more decorations… and the pictures make it look a lot nicer than it was! (laugher)

YA: I loved the decorations! It was always a nice surprise to come and see some giant new thing.

TT: We should definitely mention Louis, who moved to Liverpool after one of the parties and ended up building giant animals for us.

AN: Yeah, he’s one of our best friends now! He came to Liverpool, came to the party and loved it and stayed for the entire weekend including clean-up. And then when there was another party he came back…

TT:…. and he kept building these giant animals for us!

AN: That sounds like an embellishment, but it really wasn’t, they were enormous. One time I was kinda joking with him saying it would be great if you could get a giant head projected onto the dance floor that watches people while they’re dancing. He just said ‘Yeah, let’s do it’. So we did! He made this little booth that you could stick your head in, in a wardrobe, and on the wardrobe he put a sign saying ‘Please read this story for instant fame.’ You would put your head inside this little black thing, and there was a tiny piece of writing and you have to squint at it and a camera that you couldn’t really see projected your face onto the dance floor. So it looks like you’re squinting at everyone! That was pretty cool.

ML: Yetunde, do you want to tell me a little bit about your process? Were they candid shots or was there something you were specifically focusing on?

YA: Yes, a lot of them are candid because I don’t like staged shots.  it’s not how people are, they don’t just stand there waiting for a picture. I found it a very natural experience, I never really felt like I was looking for something, I was just aware and then I’d see it, and I’d take a picture.

ML: I think when you’re looking at the picture that’s what it feels like – a record of a good party. Do you usually take pictures of people, outside of the parties?

YA: I don’t really do any kinds of specific photography, like architecture. It’s mostly just people. People doing things.

AN I don’t know if that’s intentional but so many of the photos I’ve seen I think ‘Oh, that photo really catches that vibe of what was happening’. I don’t know if it’s because I can appreciate the context, but they really do tell a story.

YA: I won’t lie, I’m a really nosy person! It’s the storytelling element of it, because if you’re going tell a story, intervening in the story doesn’t make it authentic. So being nosy, snooping on people and trying to be incognito while carrying a giant flash around, that’s what I did! One of the things I particularly liked were the photos of people that I didn’t know, that I almost felt like I knew through the photos. You get to know them afterwards and it’s almost like you’ve created a story in your mind; this is this person and this is what they get up to. Either it turns out to be pretty close, or nothing like that at all.

I’d say the parties have changed my life in quite a tangible way, I met lots of people that I hold very dear to my heart now whom I never would have met otherwise. It’s also led me onto so many other paths, like social activism. So it’s actually played a huge part in me becoming who I am. It  seems fairly over-dramatic when I say it like that but I genuinely do feel like that, because I don’t know that I would have been so direct in trying to get involved in initiatives that concerned asylum seekers and migrants. I’d definitely say the parties were a catalyst for it.

ML: It’s great that it was so organic. Especially and if you feel like it has influenced your life in some way then it’s nice to have a record of it.

YA: I do think about it a lot actually, that in 20 or 30 years I’ll be able to looks back on these memories and have this surge of emotion for a time past. That’s a really nice part of it; the photos have a nostalgic feel to them anyway because they’re on film, so double whammy!

ML: They’re shown in a slide show projected onto the wall, alongside the zine. Were there any big decisions made about how they’re exhibited?

YA: I’m just not a huge fan of frames, I like them as a separate part, but not for photographs. I felt like it was simple, straightforward, clean. And representative of the party as well. That’s all it was, a damn good party!

ML: This is a question for everyone: do you feel like you contributed to affecting change?

TT: Yeah. I think I’m always surprised in general, at how you can go out and put something into the world;  you create a situation and that has a knock-on effect on other things. Mostly good things. Friendships, relationships, we had lots of interesting conversations about sociality… It’s the intellectual benefit of it too, which sounds really kind of lame, but that was actually it.

AN: The whole point is that you create a space that’s open and inclusive, where there’s no door policy, asylum seekers and refugees get in for free – there aren’t really that many spaces like that in society. The logistics of making a space like that, and also keeping it safe and fun for the people that are there…

TT: There’s a balance that needs to be maintained. It is a fine line, keeping people safe and doing it for your own enjoyment as well. And the ethical and moral aspects of it too. I guess it’s affected change in us as well as in a way that maybe we haven’t really calibrated yet, in our immediate social surroundings.

YA: I think it’s affected change in a way that people may not have spoken to you guys about, their eyes have been opened in some way and they’re more willing to get involved.

TT:  We met a lot of people through Asylum Link. Usually you meet someone and there might be no reason to see them again but when you have a monthly party you see them regularly, and it becomes a way of checking in on someone.  Then you become friends, and then they invite you round for dinner. So in this way, it really worked.

‘ Open 3: Affecting Change’ is at Open Eye Gallery until 17th September 2017.

A new project from some of those involved in the events is launching next month. Sisbis is a night produced by women, featuring all-women DJs. All proceeds go towards MRANG, a local charity that helps women refugees and their children. Details here.

Open 3: Affecting Change closes 17th September. Photographs and interviews with the artists are available as a limited edition zine, TILT, available in the gallery shop.

TILT is a new quarterly publication from Open Eye Gallery: a place to take a closer (and perhaps slower) look at the images, ideas and people that our exhibitions present. This first issue is limited to 150 numbered editions, available in the gallery shop for £5.

Composed of full-colour photographs and interviews, the first issue offers a deeper reflection on Open 3: Affecting Change, our exhibition of developing photographers in and around Liverpool. Interviews with the artists were conducted by Pauline Rowe, writer-in-residence, and interviews with the organisations were carried out by Dan Warner, Research Curator.

Photography can spotlight, it can celebrate; it can shape our understanding, break stereotypes and force us into new approaches. As a tool, it can be instrumental in accelerating and affecting the way that meaningful change unfolds in our society.

In TILT Issue I, we examine that process.

This summer, in partnership with Mersey Travel and National Museums Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery’s Creative Producer Liz Wewiora will be the new Mersey Ferries Artist in Residence.

From August to October 2017, Liz will be boarding the ferry and spending time with regular commuters, tourists and the Mersey Ferry staff to share and recover memories and stories of the individuals using the ferry, past and present.

As part of the project, Liz will photograph and engage with ferry-goers, documenting the immortalised ‘ferry ‘cross the Mersey’ trips. In line with her belief in socially engaged photographic practice, she’ll be taking the time to get to know the passengers and giving them the opportunity to get involved to co-create a new body of work of photographic, video and oral history context.

The project will delve into the personal stories of past events surrounding Pier Head, Seacombe & Birkenhead ferry terminals. Liz will also be providing Photostories training with Mersey Travel staff and will be collaborating with FACT’s Digital Ambassadors Over 60s group.

The work from the project will be exhibited in January 2018 at the Museum of Liverpool and Open Eye Gallery. The showcase will coincide with the Tom Wood UK premier solo show, Pierhead in Liverpool: an exhibition of his documentary photographs taken on the Mersey ferry between the 1970s – 1990s, which will be on show at Open Eye Gallery.

by Stuart Roy Clarke – £19.99

Published by The Bluecoat Press 2013

In 2015, the Premier League sold TV rights to broadcast its games for a record £5.14 billion. Yet even with record sums of television money flowing through the national game, the average season ticket price stands at £517.95 – a 1000% price rise in the past 20 years. Many football fans feel the game is slipping away from its working class roots and into hands of the wealthy few. Photographer Stuart Roy Clarke showcases the intimacy of watching the national game in an era just before football descended into a game swimming in money.

Clarke spent 25 years visiting almost 400 grounds in the United Kingdom, from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s. After the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989, he set out to document the design of many of Britain’s old football grounds before the findings of the Taylor Report came into effect. The report exposed the poor safety of many of these grounds, and forced most teams to either leave their original stadiums or replace their standing terraces with seats. Clarke stated that the aim of these photos was “to show the beauty of a nation, even if a lot of what its people say and do is not beautiful. And to show the beauty of football that is ever more a World game. And to keep on showing it.”

While many people find old football grounds ugly and uninviting, Clarke celebrates the unconventional beauty of these structures. A lot have stood since the beginning of the previous century, their walls having absorbed thousands of rapturous noises over almost 150 years of football played. His work includes photographs from the furore of a once majestic Wembley stadium during Euro 96 to a photo of Veetch Park in Swansea during a match bordering three back yards.

However, not only does he celebrate the old structures that have dotted the landscape of Britain for decades, he salutes football fans who filled these places week in and week out. Football is a collective experience. No matter who you are on the outside, once you are in the stands, you’re all the same. His photos show the multitude of emotions that millions of fans experience every week up and down the country, from the sheer joy of a last minute winner to the crushing despair of a loss, to the collective comfort of sharing these experiences with your best friends and family.

Reading The Homes of Football rekindles hope that football will not be lost forever into a world of £90 match day tickets and multi-billion pound TV deals. It showcases an endearing reality that is an irreplaceable part of the national culture.

The Homes Of Football, Where the Heart is is available to purchase in our independent bookshop.

Words by David Williams

For this project, Yetunde Adebiyi worked with Between The Borders, a collective of people with and without UK Citizenship who explore issues around migration, culture and movement.

In the exhibition, Yetunde documents the democratic, collaborative process behind producing the Between The Borders zine. She also displays some of her photographs taken at parties where free entry was granted to refugees and asylum seekers and a safe, inclusive space was established.

Her images also document her participation in an ongoing protest at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, a detention centre for people – mostly women – awaiting deportation.

Research Curator Dan Warner talks about his conversations with the radical organisations featured in current exhibition Open 3: Affecting Change, describing what contemporary photography means to him from an historian’s perspective and how photography is increasingly being used to document social change.

For this project, Jane Macneil worked with Liverpool’s North Docks Community Group to uncover the communities living and working there, many of whom do not receive recognition.

Her images reveal both the maritime history and modern industry of the area. As an area facing rapid redevelopment, her images act as both a record and celebration of an area on the brink of transformation.

For this project, artist Danny Ryder turned Open Eye Gallery’s upstairs space into a fully functioning recreation of News From Nowhere, Liverpool’s radical independent bookshop.

As well as original images of the shop, the installation also features a wide range of radical, feminist and children’s literature, available to browse and buy. All books were hand-selected by News From Nowhere staff.

This project evolved from the idea of ‘useful art’; art that serves an immediate civic function. The work is on show as part of Open 3: Affecting Change until 17th September.

For this project, Matty Lambert worked with the UTS Foundation.

This charity offers free health and wellbeing sessions to vulnerable groups across the Wirral: those recovering from cancer care, isolated older people, and disadvantaged or disaffected young people and adults who benefit from the sense of community and collective drive that the coaching sessions offer.

When It Turns To The Past by Ted Oonk & Su Jung – £5

When It Turns To The Past is part of the multi-medial project Contour – a collaboration between Dutch and Korean artists, Ted Oonk and Su Jung. The publication is a haunting index of black and white medium, divided by a comforting narrative of twelve short stories, written by Jung.

The short fiction follows nostalgic and romantic discourse surrounding the mysterious phenomenon of islands and the things they are inhabited by. Isolated by their own circumstances, the characters featured in each excerpt explore feelings of loss and abandonment and how the paralleled remoteness of the island, hypothetical or not, enables them to heal.

The textural photography throughout reflects the enforced solitude that islands can gift to people. Reading each page and taking in each image feels like wandering in a lucid dream; vaguely familiar, yet tinged by the angst of being adrift. Images of luring forests, tightly packed cattle and ominous cloud formations echo the foreboding thoughts in Jung’s stories, capturing notions of ageing, loss and choice.

The combined text and photography deal with themes of continuous hardships and introspective discovery. Humans may be genetic vessels whose emotions are mere side effects of this cycle, but it is through the choice of whether to stay or go, despite being free to leave the island, that renders the book’s subjects instantly captivating.

Contour will be screened on our Digital Window Gallery in Mann Island’s atrium space from the 6 July. When It Turns To The Past is also available to buy in our independent shop.

Words by Gina Schwarz

17 year old Marta Trivellato is studying History of Art and Fashion Design at G.B. Ferrari – A. Corradini in Italy, and is currently on a placement with Open Eye Gallery. Marta reviews one of the newest books in our independent gallery shop; This Land by Peter Byrne.

The Old Wild West. It’s been a long time since then; nowadays those years are only legend, a memory far away in the past for most people, but not for all. The Photographer Peter Byrne recently published an intriguing book about the tradition that is still very much alive today.

The book tells the story of 21st Century cowboys, men that are continuing the tradition, working in the same place and in the same way as their ancestors. More specifically, the author focuses his attention on the connection between cowboys, nature and the changing climate through a sequence of landscapes and candid shots from the cowboys’ everyday life. Byrne, here, describes the inspiration behind his concept:

“I am captivated by the desolation of deserts and mountains and their relationship with the loneliness and solitude of the cowboy… how the ever-changing landscape can shape the temperament and personality of the cowboys, creating a unique bond, built on knowledge, respect and appreciation of the land.”

One of the most interesting features of the book is the contrast between images of strikingly beautiful landscapes and the representation of the difficult and hard life of a cowboy. When you see the beautiful landscapes of the American West you wish to go there and to share the experiences that these people face with the belief that everything must be easy and relaxed, but this may not be the case.

As it is portrayed in the book, the landscape can hide lots of dangers such as terrible weather conditions and hard labour; it shows what it really takes to be a true cowboy.

You can find this book in our independent gallery shop for £30.

Lisa Oldroyd is a local photography student currently exploring community based photographic practice in the region. We caught up with Lisa to discuss her take on the current Culture Shifts program, and how her own practice relates to it.

With the Culture Shifts project well underway, we see up to eleven photographers nationally and internationally working in collaboration with volunteers over seven parts of Merseyside. These involve a wide range of community groups coming together to create art through photography, and to form a narrative of their own experiences that is relevant to them.

Culture Shifts is a perfect example of how communities and the arts can come together to create a successful creative collaboration. These types of projects are becoming more important, as we see funding being cut overall for arts and culture. Over the past five years, there has been a narrowing of audience and participation when it comes to the arts industry in the UK. We are becoming increasingly more disconnected from the arts in this country. Everyone should have access to the arts and gain cultural experiences. Sometimes this is not just visiting gallery, but taking part and creating the art. Culture Shifts is a prime example of this, putting the socially engaged arts back on the high priorities for galleries.

Whilst studying BA Photography at the University of Central Lancashire, I have taken a special interest in socially engaged practices, focusing not only on my photographic work in this area but also my written research, each very much informing the other. I completed my dissertation on the importance of socially engaged practice and effects the practice has on our everyday consumption of culture, and the social economics groups affected by the participation and audience of arts in the UK. I will be starting my MA in Photography in September 2017 and within this I will be expanding upon my research in this important area. I am currently working on several photographic community engagement projects in my local area with 55+ luncheon groups and mental illness support groups, as well as closely following the progress of the Culture Shifts program and shadowing artist with the on-site training. Collectively the practice and research based experience will inform and develop my future practice.

Each of the Culture Shifts projects will be exhibited within the group’s local community; taking the groups from start to finish on the projects, all ending on a large show at the Open Eye Gallery in Autumn 2017 and I am looking forward to seeing the results of this socially engaged photographic programme.

No Plan B: Photographs from 1993-2016
by David J. Carol
published by Peanut Press, 2016

Review by Stephen Clarke

In the last line of his introduction to Robert Frank’s photobook The Americans, Jack Kerouac focuses on the picture of a ‘lonely elevator girl’.  Caught by the photographer as the elevator doors momentarily stand open, the elevator girl gazes forlornly out: she is moving in one direction as Frank travels in another. Frank’s book of black and white photographs, chronicled his travels across 1950s America. Kerouac’s On the Road, an exhaustive flow of stream of  consciousness prose that came to encapsulate the American road trip, had been published two years earlier in 1957. Swiss by birth, Frank’s pictures reveal his understanding of his adopted country and have served as a landmark for the work of later photographic travellers. David Carol’s publication No Plan B (2016) follows Frank’s lead, continuing the pursuit of what it means to be an American.

David Carol was born in New York in 1958. He attended the city’s School of Visual Arts, and the New School for Social Research. At the latter, he was taught by the Austrian-born Lisette Model, another European émigré like Frank.  Observation of the peculiarities in the world around him may have been nurtured by contact with Model. Both Frank and Model photographed an America that was alien to them; consequently, they introduced Americans to the strangeness of their own country. Composed of fifty states, the USA is diverse and spread wide; most of its population will know only a small part of the whole. In the preface to No Plan B, Carol relates that as a child he had not travelled far. At the age of 20 he was inspired, by the example of Jack Kerouac, to undertake a road trip. The trip fuelled his ambition to travel and to become a photographer. Although a New Yorker, his images are not confined to this city. For Carol, photographs and exploration are bound together as he visits places within his nation’s borders and beyond.

Carol’s pictures are not programmatic: ruled by disciplined whimsy, his pictures are noticeably humorous. It is the playfulness in Carol’s work that attracted the attention of Craig Atkinson at Café Royal Books (CRB), a UK-based publisher of photozines. In 2013, Atkinson had published work by the New York photographer Joni Sternbach that Carol had seen and admired. By October of 2013, Carol had produced his first book with CRB, Where’s the Monkey? The photobook’s cover shows a number of out houses strewn across a New Mexico desert landscape: an unwitting nod to Britain’s Dr Who perhaps, the American photographer took his British audience on a tour through his observations. Two further titles by the independent publisher were released in 2014: Here’s the Deal and All My Pictures Look the Same! These became a part of Carol’s growing archive of pictures that record everyday occurrence. Atkinson recognizes that in Carol there is a sensibility akin to British photographers. His small, witty statements come together as coherent analysis in the same manner as projects by Homer Sykes and Patrick Ward, two other names who have made books with Atkinson at Café Royal.

No Plan B has been published by Peanut Press, Carol’s own imprint co-founded with Ashly Stohl in 2015. It’s augural publication, Charth Vader, is Stohl’s gently humorous picturing of her youngest son Charlie. Since the publishing of Stohl’s book, the partners of Peanut Press have worked with Rammy Narula (Platform 10, 2015) and Richard Bram (New York, 2016). Carol’s No Plan B is its latest publication, a compilation of 32 black and white photographs, printed in an edition of 1000. Opening with a brief text by Carol, and closing with an equally concise afterword by Jason Eskenazi, the book is an eclectic collection of images made over twenty-five years. Its title refers to Carol’s whole-hearted commitment to the medium: there was no turning back once he had made the decision to become a photographer.

At the start of his visual journey, the picture Turnaround (2012) challenges the viewer to go no further; the road sign of Long Island, New York demands, in capital letters, that both the photographer and his audience go back. Carol’s attitude can be truculent, something we expect of a confident New Yorker, and so his travels were not going to be that easily curtailed. Leaving his native shores, Carol washes up on a beach in Turkey where he is confronted by a slow moving turtle; on the sands of Acapulco three dogs lazily stray into his view. The Movie Theater Lady taken in Moscow in 1993, shares a strong visual correspondence with the man in the New York Newsstand taken over twenty years later. The poetry of Bubble in Paris, France and the mystery of Boat in Mystic, Connecticut reveal a more sensitive view. These are photographs made to please himself, as he notes his surroundings; they are not made to please others. A closing picture titled Who Cares reinforces this attitude. Written on the back of what appears to be inflatable headgear atop the shoulders of a man crossing a street in New York, the remark is both a defence against critics and acknowledgement that these images may only matter to those who do care.

As the Director of Photography at a large organization dealing with outdoor signage, Carol was aware of the constraints of commercial photography. In contrast, Carol’s twenty-five year road trip has allowed more freedom. Like many others, he has followed the travelogue laid out by Frank and Kerouac, but on this road found his own American identity. Conscious of the vastness of the United States, Americans are encouraged to take an individualist journey. On his odyssey, this traveller experienced the world as quick glances and chance meetings. The hand-held camera is ideally suited to record these moments. The subject passes out of the frame at speed before the photographer can determine the significance of what has been seen. In 2013, the glimpse of a girl on the subway in New York City becomes the focus of Carol’s lens. Caught between stations, the photographer and Subway Girl have a predestined rendezvous.

No Plan B: Photographs from 1993-2016 by David J. Carol.
Hard cover, 32 black & white photographs.
Published by Peanut Press.

No Plan B is available to purchase directly from the website www.peanutpressbooks.com

For more information on David J. Carol visit his website www.davidcarol.com

Stephen Clarke is an artist, writer and lecturer based in the North West.
His photobook St Helens is published by Café Royal Books.

On May 28th, Intern Magazine bought F You Pay Me, their night of ‘alternative’ careers advice to Open Eye Gallery. Sally Slingsby, a second year Fine Art student currently on placement at the gallery, shares her impressions of the night.

As a Fine Art student so often exposed to the negative stigmas attached to the industry and that of ‘my future career’, it is very easy to become filled with self-doubt. Since starting university, I’ve developed a growing concern in regard to my place within the art world and within the creative industries. Such concerns are frequently discussed in my course, and a lack of direction is well recognised within many creative courses at university.

Reflecting on this last night affirmed the vital importance of events like F YOU PAY ME for navigating the creative industries as a young person. INTERN, in collaboration with Open Eye Gallery, hosted an evening of great opportunity for people working in creative practices to come together in an informal, collaborative, alternative environment. The event acted as a platform for engagement and discussion between specialists, mentors, students and graduates. The evening was an opportunity to converse, meet new people and learn from each other.

Looking around the room I watched creatives exchange details to collaborate in the future, I watched students selling work and buying from others, ideas were shared and and celebrated, conversation was flowing harmoniously, and as a developing student, the response from myself and others was more than positive.

I have to admit that before turning up, I was pretty apprehensive about attending because:

A) It would be my first time attending an event at the gallery as an intern (WILL MY UNRULY FRIENDS EMBARRASS ME?)

B) F you pay me was essentially an evening of careers advice (CAREERS + ADVICE = TERRIFYING).

But leaving the event hours later, I almost laughed thinking of the unnecessary worry I had brought upon myself.

As I made my way around the gallery that evening, immersed in a collective sense of excitement, enthusiasm and aspiration, I felt a wave of confidence. Confidence within myself, confidence within my peers and confidence within the industry. The preconceptions of the ‘careers evening’ I was expecting had been completely extinguished.

Group sessions were available to discuss specific career paths hosted by a number professionals. The freedom of discussion was incredible to witness and the passion for the arts was palpable; I felt a sense of assurance as I watched both students and specialists learn from one another.

I listened to students talking about their successes and failures as the mentors recounted similar stories. The conversations were open yet intimate, the atmosphere in the gallery was energetic, and everyone was eager to get involved.

One conversation which truly resonated with me was one between graphic design mentor Gemma Germains and a developing graphic design student. The student explained of her recent, shall we say, ‘F – up’ for an assessed collection of work in which she felt pretty discouraged. Questioning whether she was on the right path for a future career in graphic design, Germains was quick to neutralize any self-doubt.

Speaking of her many unfavourable choices and mistakes throughout a career as a graphic designer, Germains openly encouraged the group to embrace every mistake that came their way. This was such a simple but important statement for a practicing student to remember. Germains explained how the creative industry doesn’t always pose right or wrong answers: mistakes can often be the best learning curve one can experience. Coming from a designer with such a wealth of knowledge, experience and skill it was a refreshing conversation to be a part of.

F YOU PAY ME was a platform to develop confidence and make connections with peers. Not only did I feel a more familiar understanding in regard to how the industry works, I left feeling more self assured that I myself am moving forward in the right direction.

As part of LOOK/17 Liverpool International Photography Festival, Open Eye Gallery’s Research Curator Dan Warner asked people living and working in Liverpool about how the festival themes of urbanism and exchange had affected their personal lives.  What is it like to work in the Titanic Hotel, or to be a Chinese student in Liverpool?

The interviews are available to listen to here, with accompanying transcripts.

Charlotte Tsang
Charlotte, Open Eye Gallery’s Retail and Events Officer, reflects on how her own connections with Hong Kong shaped her choices of Open Eye Gallery archive shots in the show, ‘Reflections’. Charlotte’s memory of family in both Liverpool and Hong Kong inform an enlightening and personal interview in which Charlotte touches on the peculiarities of having a dual identity in two dynamic, and at times similar, cities.

Download the transcript: http://www.lookphotofestival.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Interview-Transcript-–-Charlotte-Tsang.pdf

Derek Man
Photographer and visual artist Derek Man reflects on the intricacies of housing in Hong Kong, as documented during his recent LOOK/17 assignment in the city. Aided by his contacts in the Society for Community Organisation, in this interview Derek delves further into the city’s overstretched housing market and the occasionally bizarre situations that this can create.

Download the transcript: http://www.lookphotofestival.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Interview-Transcript-–-Derek-Man.pdf

Yiwen 艺文
Yiwen, a Chinese postgraduate student and pictured in Yan Preston’s series on the contemporary Chinese community in Liverpool, explores the simultaneously refreshing and alienating social and cultural experience of Chinese students in the city and the university.

Download the transcript: http://www.lookphotofestival.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Interview-Transcript-–-Yiwen.pdf

Vicki-Lee Walberg
A personal assistant in Liverpool’s Rum Warehouse and Titanic Hotel, Vicki reflects on the trials and tribulations of working in an old and historic building. Posing a distinctive set of challenges, the building also provides unique opportunities to create meaningful and distinctive spaces, suggesting that the very nature of the urban space around us plays a crucial function in our everyday lives.

Download the transcript: http://www.lookphotofestival.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Interview-Transcript-–-Vicki-Walberg.pdf

Paul Jones

Using LOOK17’s Building the Civic exhibition as a point of departure, Paul Jones, senior lecturer in sociology, social policy and criminology at the University of Liverpool, discusses some of the most pressing issues facing the nature of democracy in our cities. As sites of capital and exchange, Paul explores the effects of private ownership of Liverpool’s regeneration flagships and the potential alternatives to the current system.

Download the transcript: http://www.lookphotofestival.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Interview-Transcriot-Paul-Jones.pdf

Wo Bik Wong’s photographs of the Port of Liverpool building (one of the Three Graces) look at the colonial stories stirring beneath the building’s architecture. She also considers the ways derelict spaces become renewed, photographing the world’s largest brick warehouse: the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse.
Wo Bik Wong is one of Hong Kong’s leading female photographers. She has shown many times internationally, but less frequently in the West. Her work explores city spaces and buildings, particularly those on the verge of demolition or refurbishment. As buildings transform and become repurposed, Wong invites us to consider the past, present and future of a place all at once.
Culture Shifts: Global is an exhibition of Liverpool/ Hong Kong photography at Open Eye Gallery. 7 April – 18th June 2017.

As Art Curator, Lindsay Taylor is responsible for developing the University of Salford Art Collection. She commissions new works and establishes key partnerships with art organisations, increasing the cultural profile of the University. In this role she has commissioned work from regional and international artists including Cao Fei, Declan Clarke and Brass Art.

Working with Open Eye Gallery and LOOK/ 17 Liverpool International Photography Festival curator Ying Kwok, she jointly commissioned Luke Ching’s residency in Liverpool. Luke Ching, an artist based in Hong Kong, turned an entire hotel room in Liverpool’s Titanic Hotel into a pinhole camera, producing large-scale haunting day-long exposures of the views from each window.

The work is on show as part of Culture Shifts: Global at Open Eye Gallery until 18th June. After the exhibition, it will enter the University of Salford’s growing Art Collection.

“Photography captures a moment in history, a particular second in time. We are living in a time that is informed by our past. A place is formed not with one story, but a collective story of each individual which offers multiple interpretations.” – Ying Kwok, 2017.

Ying Kwok is the curator of LOOK/17 Liverpool International Photography Festival. She works across Hong Kong and the UK.

Between 2006 and 2012, she was the curator of the CFCCA (Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art) in Manchester. This year, she curated the Hong Kong pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Culture Shifts: Global explores how our cities are changing worldwide, looking at parallels between Liverpool and Hong Kong. The exhibition runs until the 18th June.

Hong Kong based photographer Luke Ching presents familiar objects and city environments in unfamiliar ways. As both Liverpool and Hong Kong continue to evolve as cities – often radically changing from one generation to another – Ching’s photography encourages us to reflect on the history of the places that surround us.

The Titanic Hotel is situated in a refurbished warehouse on Liverpool’s North Docks. During his residency Luke Ching turned an entire hotel room into a pinhole camera, blocking out all the light except for a tiny hole and lining the walls of the room with photosensitive paper. It took over a day of exposure time for this image to form.

The view looks out over the brick warehouses and the River Mersey, places that encapsulate Liverpool’s industrial and maritime past. A warehouse is a temporary space full of things coming and going, but so too is a hotel: a place where people stay for a short while before leaving, often without a trace.

Culture Shifts: Global is an exhibition of Liverpool/ Hong Kong photography at Open Eye Gallery. 7 April – 18th June 2017.

– full contact details: name, mobile number, email, address

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The closing date for applications is 5pm on Wednesday 31st May 2017.

Commissioned by Open Eye Gallery, Derek Man, a UK citizen, re-visited Hong Kong to look at the housing market.

Born in Hong Kong but living in the UK for the past 12 years, Derek Man’s work explores cultural identity and what we call home. He often looks at how we form a sense of place, and find our own ways of feeling like we belong.

Between the human need for shelter and the commercial need for growth, Derek’s photos look at the lives of the people caught in this tension: from the families living in cramped conditions to the estate agents desperate to sell off land. In this cityscape and others like it, the struggle of finding stable homes for everyone grows increasingly more urgent every day.

Culture Shifts: Global is an exhibition of Liverpool/ Hong Kong photography at Open Eye Gallery. 7 April – 18th June 2017.

Max Gorbatskyi, current Open Eye gallery intern, reflects back on his visit to meet with the community groups collaborating on the Runcorn ‘Culture Shifts: Local’ programme with photographers Gary Bratchford and Robert Parkinson.

As part of Culture Shifts: Local – a socially engaged photography programme in which we focus on communities across Liverpool City Region, photographers Gary Bratchford and Robert Parkinson are working with groups across Halton CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group).

Recently, we visited the Brindley Theatre in Runcorn to meet with the Golden Generation group and to discuss the future exhibition that will be held there. Golden Generation is a group of Widnes Vikings rugby team supporters, aged 55 and over, who share a passion for rugby, visiting the stadium and spending time together.

This photography programme is a participatory project, where value lies in the idea of sharing personal stories and creating a common vision for it. Exhibition content is being created by the group members as well as by the photographer and then curated together. The project’s format combines the organised artistic approach with the spontaneity of amateur snapshots and a generalisation of common experience with a highly personal story from every member of the group.

At the meeting, participants had a chance to see the gallery space, review each other’s work and to share ideas about the project’s further development.

This is part of wider project, which sees photographer’s Gary Bratchford, Robert Parkinson and Halton communities explore the issues of wellness and wellbeing and questioning how photography can challenge the pre-existing ideas of this topic. The exhibition will run from 1^st July 2017 until 2^nd September.

The first evidence of people settling in Kirkby can be found in the Doomsday book when, in 1086, it had a population of about 70.  So it’s a place that carries over ten centuries of human habitation; a place that knows many ghosts.

It’s been a privilege to listen to the Golden Years group recently – women discussing their lives (and experiences of this much changed place) at the Northwood Community Centre.  They are women who know and share the great gift of friendship. They have been working with Kirkby-born photographic artist, Tony Mallon on Culture Shifts, a project organised through the Open Eye Gallery.*

Culture Shifts in Kirkby is focussed on listening to and recording the women’s responses to their home town through photography, including conversations about their lives prompted by photographic images of Kirkby.  This collaboration will lead to an Autumn exhibition that will aim to show the strength of Kirkby through some of its most dedicated citizens. .

I was struck by the collective stories the women share of escaping from the slum housing of post-war city-centre Liverpool to the countryside.  How Kirkby meant fresh air and beautiful new houses but also a move away from old, established communities; people being displaced by peace yet hopeful of a new start.

There are other tales here too of silenced voices and economic uncertainty, ageing and frailties of health.  Stories about how land farmed by tenants of Lord Sefton was reclaimed for government purposes to become the Kirkby Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) where 10% of UK munitions were produced during the war. Tales of the breaking of families – how generations working together in the local factories such as Birdseye were disrupted and dispersed because of their closure.  How meadows full of birds have been transformed into wastelands and now parklands. How politicians have done deals and kept silent. How high rises (associated in the womens’ experiences with suicides) were pulled down. How the ROF land was transformed in the 60s into an industrial estate that later came to house the ill-fated Sonae factory, a place where two men died in an horrific industrial accident; a place that poured its fumes into the local air, a place that burned and left more than a bitter taste in the mouths of local residents.

I’ve found that Kirkby is rich with ghosts, proud of its people and never silent about the trials those people have learned to face. I am looking forward to learning more on my next visit to the Northwood Community Centre.

All images C. Tony Mallon & Northwood Golden Year’s community group 2017

In 1961, Skelmersdale was officially designated as a New Town, designed to house the population spillover from Liverpool and surrounding areas in Merseyside.

Glassball’s documentation of the town aims to act as an archive, which gives readers a sense of the town’s history through a non-chronological mix of photographs, interviews and film stills. Skem’s history is expressed through the experiences and memories of people who have lived and grown in the emerging town, offering a personal insight into the development and expansion of the town’s community.

Through an eclectic mix of images, readers can gain a perception of the town’s unique nature; seeming as a town springing from nowhere among Lancashire’s fields. The series creates a strong juxtaposition between the rural outskirts of Skem compared to its modern infrastructure, characterised by classic 1960’s architecture.

Glassball Art Projects occupied a shop unit within Skelmersdale, inviting residents to come and view a collection of images and videos showcasing the town’s history in order to provoke personal stories about their experiences living and working within the community. Some of these conversations are featured within this book, posing questions such as: How long does it take for a town to become a community? How many generations of families does it take for a community to emerge? To which the artist group aims to answer through this selection of written and visual information.

This publication is currently on sale in our independent bookshop for £20, perfect for anyone interested in local history or architecture.

By Faye Hamblett-Jones

Derek Man, a 29-year-old UK citizen, re-visited Hong Kong to look at the housing market, commissioned by Open Eye Gallery for LOOK17.  Anna Taylor caught up with Derek on the opening of the festival to talk about the rapid growth of global cities and the accommodation crisis in China.

The idea for the exhibition was to have someone who is originally from Hong Kong, but who has lived abroad for long enough, going back with a kind of refreshed perspective, sort of like strangely familiar.

I’ve lived in the UK for 12 years, every time I go back I am struck by how quickly the cityscape is changing and new buildings have popped up all in a matter or two or three years. I just thought if that’s the commercial side – where do people live? I started researching and realized that there is a shortage of affordable housing – its something that I’ve always known, everyone is aware of it, but its quite abstract – its just something that happens to some people, the tiny flats are just a thing, they don’t know where or how. In a way it feels like they are, literally and metaphorically in a box – but there’s no context around it. I wanted to place the situation back into the context of this crazy world of new builds and multi million pound flats and estate agents – everything that is happening around it. This all happens under the same roof – from the same city. Most of the scenes I photographed were in Kowloon, a couple of streets down from each other.

This picture of two girls – that’s actually pretty much their whole flat and to my right would be the kitchen – slash – bathroom. Its not uncommon for a flat to have a toilet a few feet away from where you’re preparing food. It’s a family of four who live in that flat and share that bunk bed, so the girls have the top bed and the parents sleep on the lower bunk. But during the summer when it gets too hot – the mum will have to sleep on the floor in front of the bed. That little bit of space there, in front of the bed, actually functions as their dining space, where they do their homework, their play area, basically the whole living room is in that few square foot.

That is not uncommon – I had some help from a local organisation who work with families such as this. I’m not looking for the most sensationalist, or the most extreme – I said just give me what is the norm – this is not uncommon.

This is near where I grew up in Hong Kong, in the new territories where its at the end of the line, a place called Wu Kai Sha – you know just like in every major city, the house prices near the railway network…as soon as they build a new one it sky rockets. That was on top of the station of Ma On Shan Line. I was actually looking for the sea, because from first hand experience, my own bedroom – it’s a long time ago, we moved to that flat when I was still a kid and we had a sea view. And over the years things kept popping up between us and the sea. Now, when I look out, outside the window, its hundreds of other people’s windows. I just wanted to find more examples of that – what’s the view out there? This is a million pound flat. Out of the window you can see the three black and orange buildings, quite strange looking, even by Hong Kong standards. (Apparently designed by the same guy who designed the Pompidou). Those popped up two or three years ago, so whoever sells this flat – when they bought it they were promised a full sea view, and now, well, there’s still a gap in the middle, but there’s a construction site, so perhaps in fact in two or three years it will be fully filled up, so its not quite there yet, but its getting there. And the drapes – I like the contrast between the drapes and the futuristic looking buildings – its like this empty flat is looking to the inevitable future.

This is the landscape in Kowloon City – this is actually the area I went to school and spent 12 years of my life, so that’s near the old Kaitak airport, so low rise buildings – they moved the airport to its current site now back in 97 so since then they lifted the height limit for buildings, so people can build. But because it wasn’t being developed as a whole area, it was – once one building came down, a new one would go up, because they just have this area, they build a whole apartment building that fits exactly that shape. And over the years it turns into all these tall and skinny buildings and makes for quite a peculiar skyline. And that is something that, because of my own memories of the place and my own experience – it probably was happening then, but it was this going back, with this new idea that it becomes very apparent – its weird, that fits the narrative of what I’m trying to convey.

www.derekman.com

Derek Man’s work can be seen throughout LOOK17 in Culture Shifts: Global, Open Eye Gallery, 7^th April – 18^th June 2017

Born in Hong Kong but living in the UK for the past 12 years, Derek Man’s work explores cultural identity and what we call home. He often looks at how we form a sense of place, and find our own ways of feeling like we belong.

Between the human need for shelter and the commercial need for growth, Derek’s photos look at the lives of the people caught in this tension: from the families living in cramped conditions to the estate agents desperate to sell off land. In this cityscape and others like it, the struggle of finding stable homes for everyone grows increasingly more urgent every day.

Interview by Anna Taylor www.anna-taylor.net

Hong Kong based artist Luke Ching has transformed a newly refurbished room in Liverpool’s Titanic Hotel into a giant pinhole camera, capturing the historic dock area in transformation. Open Eye Gallery Curator Thomas Dukes speaks to Anna Taylor, LOOK/17, about the project so far…

L:  Luke Ching has just spent three weeks in Liverpool working on the project – how did it go?

TD: Oh it was brilliant, scary but then incredibly exciting and relieving. We had the space booked for him at the Titanic Hotel, and then when we talked to Luke he was saying, ‘we’re going to need lots of boards, and chemicals’ and we were thinking ‘are you sure the Titanic Hotel is going to be the right place to do this?!’

So we talked it through a lot with them, and said ‘he’s going to be making a giant pinhole camera’ and they were like ‘Yeh.’ The room was only available for so long, so it was really tight for time, but Luke was really focused on doing it. So at the start, you can imagine roughly what is going to happen in theory – you can look at some past images that he’s made, but when he’s actually in there, you’re like, ‘what’s going on in there? What’s happening?’ You can’t go and see, because the room is so dark and has to stay fixed. Then there was the rubbish weather – really foggy, cloudy and hazy, no sun and not clear, so poor vision out of the windows, so it was like ‘oh god, what is happening?” But I went down and saw him on the second to last day that he was in there. It was the first time I had met him, and he was dead nice and we had a chat and he said did I want to come and have a look. This was amazing; it was so good. Being able to go up and see the work like that – it was a relieving moment, seeing it and knowing that the project was exactly the right thing to do.

L: Give us a sense of how big the pinhole camera is? Is it literally made of the room? How had the room been blacked out?

TD: So you do wonder about the logistics of it! There were two windows in the hotel room, and we’d ordered him loads of 10mm foam board, so he just made giant walls over the windows, and the actual physics and construction of it still baffles me – one of the angles that he’s got, meant that one of the windows wasn’t just straight back, there was a real angle on the projection…so the actual science of it…obviously I suppose that’s why he’s an artist and he works in that way, but yes, the camera was an entire blacked out room.

L: So the camera was temporarily installed for his visit. How were the images recorded?

TD: Yes, he had to build it – so the throw distance of where the paper is in relation to where the pinhole is determines to a degree, focus and what you can see and the scale of things. So for one of the prints it was literally, block off one window, make a pinhole and on the other side of the room the paper was pinned, and on the other one – another of the prints, he had to make a fake backboard that he could tape the paper to, and then he could see. Seeing them was just great. He recorded three images in total – he’s going to turn one of them into a positive as well, which is going to be smashing. And that’s going to be the big one – it looks fantastic. The buildings are of historic significance and then you see them and see how this all came together really nicely.

You can see Luke CHING in Culture Shifts: Global at Open Eye Gallery, 6 April – 18 June 2017

Culture Shifts: Global features commissioned new work by three artists who in the run up to the festival are producing new work that makes connections between Liverpool and Hong Kong. The exhibition explores the city and urbanism through outsider’s eyes.

The exhibition is part of Open Eye Gallery’s Culture Shifts programme, a socially engaged project dedicated to making photography meaningful to various local, national and international communities.

Interview by Anna Taylor.

www.anna-taylor.net

Pauline Rowe, our writer-in-residence, pens her personal response to our current exhibition, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion. She also presents two of her poems, selected in response to ‘North’.

North is an exhibition at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery (6^th Jan – 19^th March), curated by Lou Stoppard and Adam Murray. It offers a wide range of images, films, interviews, clothes, fashion, voices (even furniture props) that give a sense of the cultural and visual heritage of the North, from Liverpool to Yarm, from Blackpool to Berwick.

The first chorus of Victoria Wood’s song ‘Northerners’ could be used as a preliminary checklist for the exhibition, with every line ticked (with the exception, perhaps, of tripe):

You just go:

Tripe,clogs

Going to the dogs

Wigan and Blackpool tram

Brassbands

Butties in your hands

Whippets and next door’s mam.

Clothcap

Hankie full of snap

Shawlsandscabbyknees

Hot-pot

Seven to a cot

Headscarves and mushypeas.

What is cliché while exhausted with overuse is nevertheless rooted in true experience. I grew up in Widnes, an industrial, rugby town, 13 miles outside of Liverpool in the years when Thatcherite policy determined the managed decline of towns like mine. I travelled every day by coach to school in Liverpool making me at once a woolly-back in Liverpool and (according to disapproving Widnesian peers) a “snob” at home. My childhood North was made of Catholicism, playing out on the Bongs, running to the corner shop on “a message”, praying for the dead, trips to “the dogs” on Friday night (where my Uncle Joe raced Mitty, his greyhound), a weekly visit to the library, Saturday night Confession; there was also a fierce sense of class loyalty in my Dad’s romantic Socialism. The domestic drama we knew came from Mum’s ambition for an education denied her and a desire to live in a different part of town. In brief, mine was a trope-drenched North that came to me from a heritage of coal-mining and ‘illegitimacy’ through my mother’s family and agricultural labour, factory work, and a love of drink on my Dad’s side. (Yet so much more than this, of course.)

Each of us can find some evidence of our own North in the Stoppard-Murray exhibition, whether reflecting experience, memory or imagination. There are voices and faces that resonate, as well as a challenging sense of place, appearance, beauty and geography.

I didn’t go to the Hacienda in the early 80s although there were older kids (growing up in Widnes, like me) whose cultural focus was Manchester rather than Liverpool.  I was so out of tune with the fashion-music zeitgeist of the late 70s that I can’t tell you who was playing on the one night I went to Eric’s (I’d gone there as an alibi of sorts for my friend, Phil) or who served me when I went to buy Patti Smith’s Horses from Probe Records.  I didn’t wear make-up, my hair was short and my adolescent idea of fashion was a pair of pale cords, a granddad shirt, a pair of braces, checked hacking jacket and a flat cap. My casual look depended on dungarees and a variety of badges. I hold my hands up. Fashion, to me, is – and always has been – another country. So the casual (masculine) aesthetic through football and music, Adidas and Fred Perry or Paul Smith’s R. Newbold celebrated in Gallery Two and in Gary Aspen’s film/interview remains a charming mystery. I don’t think fashion trivial or pointless – it’s just a baffling alternative universe.

The GPO film Spare Time made in 1939 by Humphrey Jennings and shown in Gallery One is a gem (you can also find it on Youtube). It’s a documentary about the people of four towns (Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton, Pontypridd) – and the three industries of steel, cotton and coal. It observes the hours “(b)etween work and sleep … a time we call our own” “a time when we have a chance to do what we like, a chance to be most ourselves” away from work. For purposes of the exhibition South Wales becomes a kind of honorary North. In this amorphous in-between time we see ghosts of our own familial histories. A woman pours a cup of tea, a man puts on his hat and scarf, there are rural bike rides, pubs, pies and brass-bands, football, the penny pools, a pigeon shed, men in flat caps, factories, the pit-head. The rhythms of the mill towns are different to coal villages and steel towns. The doleful Welsh voices singing Handel, appropriate accompaniment to the images of men carrying lamps in the dark, provide an elegy for lost systems of labour, as well lost communities.

Also In Gallery One there are photographs of the non-famous, some more arresting than the glamorous magazine/archival images of Morrissey or Liam and Patsy. Alice Hawkins’ The Liver Birds (2013) shows two sharp, young women dressed in complementary black and white, wearing their rollers like a fashion helmet – a familiar defiance and confidence in their glamour and poise. This image is positioned close to John Bulmer’s Mill Girls, Ellan Yorkshire (1965); faces from the mid-sixties, young girls coming from work wearing floral pinnies under heavy coats with scarves tied around their rollered heads and under their chins, worn in the manner of older women. They are eating chips from newspaper and one girl is looking away smiling while her companion (perhaps her sister) stares with suspicion at the camera, out at us. Then there’s street photographer Shirley Baker’s Glamorous Elderly Lady Smoking (1985) – the image of an old girl sitting on a city-centre bench smoking. Her wig, her netted hat and winter coat are all chestnut brown. Her small downward smile is set in an over-generous application of lipstick. She has sketched her mouth with imagination and hope. The rings on her left (cigarette-holding) hand suggest stability while her face tells a very different story. Yet the dominating image in Gallery One is Jamie Hawkesworth’s photograph of an eleven year old girl with long blonde hair wearing a bright (almost Marian) blue Gucci suit that’s too big for her. A serious, questioning character shines out of her face above the garments raising questions of wealth and poverty, femininity, class, religion even. She is odd, misplaced, triumphant – and made me think of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.

There are more questions raised than answered by North about Northern identity – about gender and power, beauty and industry, heritage and class, language and image – but this is why it is so timely, and well worth a visit before it closes on 19^th March.

Please also note that there is a wonderful resource through SHOWStudio that remains available beyond the exhibition dates for films and interviews and imaginative projects with students (see: http://showstudio.com/project/north)

The following poems were taken from Waiting for the Brown Trout God, Pauline Rowe (Wirral, Headland Publications, 2009)

1967

That winter she signed up for night school,

sneaked books in underneath her coat. Brought Blake

home with his tyger. Slow burning fuel

for those first arguments. No mistake

to think poetry dangerous. His voice

lower than hers but we could hear her shout


just talk to me – listen – I have no choice –


He worked at Fords. Couldn’t work her out.

Next social history. The Spinning Jenny.


Revolutions at our kitchen table.


No more apple pies and not many


laughs. No shifts left. He was unable


to turn back to when ignorance was bliss.


She studied books. His life was hit and miss.

Autobiography 1968

The white blonde hair a memory as school

begins with scrapings from the desk

of wax and dirt like crayon worms but black.

 

Each Morning Offering a pledge

of works, prayers, sufferings and joys

like letters fixed on pyramids of milk.

 

At night, an old man dying in a room

my sister fills with blossom

pink and stooped in cups along the window ledge.

 

We laugh although we are without the teeth we need

to speak the kind of words we hear in waves;

warming valves, phonograms, receivers.

 

On Friday nights

St. Helens and the Dogs, my father’s treat,

a glass of vimto and a soft ham barm.

We amble to the car

 

then orange street lamps pass us,

many equal frames of moving frame

on reel. On Sunday night,

the week made circular with light

 

from radio turned low

and mother’s candle

burning in the church.

In our independent bookshop we have lots of photo books and zines that capture Northern culture, fashion and our bold identity. Take a look at some of the fantastic publications we have for sale.

Stephen McCoy, Café Royal Books, £10.00

North Western indie publisher Café Royal Books encapsulate British cultural change and provide an essential accompaniment to our current exhibition ‘North: Identity, Photography, Fashion’. We have a large collection of these spectacular zines in our gallery shop, many documenting areas local to us including Tricia Porter’s Liverpool South Docks and John Stoddart: Liverpool Before the Exodus. One of a multifarious array of exhibiting artists, Stephen McCoy, has works exploring a candid perspective of Liverpudlian culture. The captivating photography of McCoy’s 1984 series Skelmersdale depicts unequivocally Northern landscapes and its residents during eras of economic decline.

The North, John Bulmer, £19.99

Donkey jackets, ginnels and cobbles abound, renowned photojournalist John Bulmer journeys through raw Northern landscapes and bleak suburbs with a series of works collected from the magazines who lent his talent.

Bulmer captures the lives of the working people who were facing vast cultural transformation throughout the 60s and 70s. This poignant archive reflects the sudden use of colour photography in the British Press during this time. Bulmer adopts this adjustment seamlessly, with his later photographs depicting a subtle change in narrative, a more enlightening North!

Girlfans, Jacqui McAssey and Alex Hurst, £5 

There‘s no match between the reds and the blues in these striking zines as each limited edition issue is dedicated to how female football fans show their support through fashion. Here, you’ll see a colourful documentation of women supporters, Liverpudlians and Evertonions, one of which combines her home strip with the likes of Louis Vuitton and Chanel accessories – now how fab is that!

—

Written By Gina Schwarz

In 2017 Open Eye Gallery is celebrating its 40th Birthday Year.

Open Eye Gallery’s success is down to the many people who have shaped and grown the organisation over the last 40 years. The new Wall Work features snapshot-quotes from 40 people reflecting upon their experience of Open Eye Gallery. Shaped by our Research Curator and oral historian Dan Warner, and designed by Thom Isom, through the 2017 facade of the gallery we wish to pay homage to a much larger group of photographers, volunteers, partners, visitors and staff who have championed our work.

Open Eye Gallery, Where I…

Share your experiences
#OEG40

Open Eye Gallery, where I… was dynamic. We were doing an exhibition a month. It wasn’t madness – it was exciting. Opportunities came up and we took them. – 1978
Colin Wilkinson, Founder of Open Eye Gallery

Open Eye Gallery, where I… found out that art can shock people. If you’re not provoking people into thought, what are you doing? – 1980
Peter Hagerty, Director (1978-81)

Open Eye Gallery, where I… protested against an exhibition. Myself and other feminists sprayed shaving foam on some quite graphic images of women. – 1980
Mandy, Visitor/Acquaintance

Open Eye Gallery, where I… worked with some of the best British photographers of the time, and of the present. We showed people like Martin Parr, Tom Wood, Chris Killip, John Davies, John Stoddart. They all emerged to national prominence, and I was massively proud of that. Liverpool should be too. – 1985
Neil Burgess, Director (1981-1986)

Open Eye Gallery, where I… discovered photography was what I’d do for the rest of my life. Having a voice that people want to hear is a rare privilege. – 1999
Simon Norfolk, Photographer

Open Eye Gallery, where I… got my first full-time job as trainee programme assistant. A significant occasion, because my Chinese parents always supported my madness for the arts, but never knew how. – 2000
Debbie Chan, Member of Staff (2000-03)

Open Eye Gallery, where… the exhibition ‘Ground Zero’ by Joel Meyerowitz had it’s UK launch attended by the US Ambassador William Farrish, The US Cultural Attaché and NYC Fire Department personnel and LOTS of heavily armed Secret Service/Special Branch! A very surreal evening. – 2002
Paul Mellor, Director (1995-2004)

Open Eye Gallery, where I… was commissioned to produce portraits of Women who worked on the docks. I worked with an oral archivist and it was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate and work with women of all ages – each with fascinating histories. The exhibition and accompanying published book The Water’s Edge were really successful outcomes to the project. – 2006
Michelle Sank, Photographer

Open Eye Gallery, where I… flew over from Sydney to attend the opening night of my show, Richard & Famous. The Gallery treated me like long lost family, and the people of Liverpool were exceptional, warm, funny, friendly and generous. – 2012
Richard Simpkin, Photographer

Open Eye Gallery, where I… worked on UK premiers with Susan Meiselas, David Goldblatt, Yto Barrada, Alec Soth, Helen van Meene, Philippe Chancel, Donovan Wylie, Anne Collier, John Stezaker, Pieter Hugo, Mishka Henner, Richard Mosse and Eva Stenram. – 2013
Partick Henry, Director (2004-2013)

Open Eye Gallery, where I… realised that photography is today the most accessible, immediate and effective tool for transnational storytelling. – 2014
Lorenzo Fusi, Director (2013-15)

Open Eye Gallery, where I… showed when I was 40 (1988) and again when I was 70 (2015). We have grown up together. – 2015
Richard Ross, Photographer

Open Eye Gallery, where I… was hugely impressed by the work of the children from SliCE workshop programme after helping them to produce a series of images created and manipulated in the gallery. – 2016
Sam Hutchinson, Photographer

Open Eye Gallery, where I… have the privilege of working in an era when billions of people are using photography to curate and share their lives and when the expertise of photographers can make real difference to communities. – 2016
Sarah Fisher, Director (2015-Present)

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion

Sat on Liverpool’s waterfront is Open Eye Gallery, one of the most important galleries – not only in the North West but also throughout the UK- for promoting photography as an artistic discipline. This year the gallery celebrates its 40^th birthday of pioneering work in this field and it has certainly started 2017 as it intends to go on. North: Identity, Photography, Fashion is a collage of medias documenting and depicting the last 30 years in the North of England and the exhibition can be regarded as a glance back over the gallery’s own history.

The show begins with an exploration of the visions and stereotypes people have of the North. One corner is dedicated to photographs and video-works that challenge –or at least expose- the historically white, hetero, boisterous image of the North which can still be seen today. Beside this are archived magazines from the likes of Homme, Face and i-D which remind us of some particularly iconic moments in northern history: an early photoshoot with Kate Moss in Blackpool, interviews with The Stone Roses, and portraits of Morrissey.

The exhibition continues into an analysis of street fashion and style in cities like Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle. The most interesting thing about these images (other than the fact that the members of Elbow were photographed in the collection – before they were famous) is how you could still walk through Hyde Park in these outfits and not look out of place (although you would be trying too hard). Also included is one of the earliest, handcrafted versions of Raf Simon’s 2003 Parka Jackets, alongside some iconic archives of Adidas trainers. These are contrasted with the newest, unreleased pieces by Off-White that were inspired by the northern fashion movements in the 90s.

The last room of the gallery houses candid interviews with artists, fashion designers and other creatives from the North, monologuing about their experiences and childhood. A personal favourite for me was Fashion Designer Thom Murphy’s interview on the rise of Acid House in the Northwest and its impact on youth culture, nightlife and violence.

Open Eye Gallery has offered an exciting and varied insight into the North over the past decades. It is difficult to discuss what is on display at the gallery in terms of fashion or photography, in the same way; it is difficult to talk about the North as one homogenous region. Its only real common denominator is diversity and variety of styles, accents, and attitudes. This exhibition has expressed this extremely well. I highly recommend paying it a visit.

—-

Written by Cameron Tallant

Introducing a new website:

PHOTOSTORIES

www.photostories.org.uk

#PhotoStories

PhotoStories – what’s yours?

An image can tell us what a thousand words may never manage to portray. Photography is embedded in our everyday lives and continues to be one of the most powerful tools of communication. With photography at our finger tips, how and what do we want to say?

Launching in February 2017, PhotoStories is a new website bringing together the work of communities and professional photographers, exploring and sharing the world around them in a powerful and sometimes challenging way.  The website showcases PhotoStories created throughout our current Culture Shifts programme, as well as inviting the public to upload and share their own narratives. 

Culture Shifts works with 10 national and international photographers embedded in communities across 7 areas of Liverpool City Region. It aims to support communities to explore their stories in a way that is meaningful to them. By co-authoring stories that reflect people’s identity, interests or lives, we hope to inspire, surprise or challenge a wider audience to participate through the new PhotoStories website.

“4 billion photographs per day are uploaded onto social media. Photography is now as important as text or verbal communication in the stories we tell about our own lives.” – Sarah Fisher, Executive Director, Open Eye Gallery

Once users have registered to PhotoStories (it’s free!), they will be able to upload their own visual narrative of 3-15 images. The website is designed to host your own online portfolio of unique PhotoStories, with features to support you to think about the way you select and curate your own digital exhibition of images. Individual photo stories can be ‘liked’ and shared by other visitors to the website. A series of guest curators, photographers and communities will choose stories to be featured in the ‘Editors Choice’ section of the site.

As part of the overall Culture Shifts programme, Redeye, the Photography Network continue to work with local community champions to deliver training sessions on framing images, selecting and uploading photographs. Videos from the training sessions will be uploaded to PhotoStories to inspire a wider public to engage with photography and the new website.

When the website launches in February 2017, projects from across Culture Shifts will be available to view.

PhotoStories is currently being developed in partnership with Liverpool’s Red Ninja.

All images are uploaded to PhotoStories under a creative commons license.

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place every year on 27th January. In this blog, we look at photographers who have captured scenes from the Holocaust and a number of genocides in their work.

Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer, who has most recently exhibited at Open Eye Gallery in 2012. His work is captivating and explores some of the worlds most horrific war zones. The body of work ‘For Most Of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory’, is a thought-provoking series. Norfolk embodies how race, religion or nation can lead to such horror in communities. The photographs include skulls of bodies found around a church in Rwanda to ash ponds at Auschwitz. He uses black and white photography to capture an eerie and still portrayal. There is a certain aspect of beauty within his work, as he has captured the purity of the places. Norfolk wants to question the idea that if a large number of people are killed, for example 6 million, soon after the public start to question the reality of the atrocity. Where as if, for example, 6 people are killed, it is news of the day.

The simple message that Norfolk is saying in his work ‘is not about yesterday, history- it is about today’. As we commemorate the Holocaust, Norfolk’s words are a key message to remember.

Signed copies of Simon Norfolk’s book ‘For Most Of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory’ are available in our independent shop for £30.

Kate Kornberg’s project ‘Witnesses: the Holocaust by Bullets’, looks at the people who witnessed the Holocaust in their communities. They have never told their stories before, and now they want to make sure they keep this tragedy from disappearing. The body of work is in colour and projects every line and shade within the persons face. On the contrary to Norfolk’s work, the photographs are upfront and clear, making the viewer see every flaw.

When viewing the photograph, at first you see a portrait, for example the photograph ‘Praskovia, Lokhvytsia, Ukraine’, but when you read the description “The Jews undressed to their underwear, the infants were covered only with their blankets. The police brought them all to the pit.” you look at it in a different way; you almost see what Paraskovia sees.

The work embodies Norfolk’s belief that ‘history is today’. These people are living with what they witnessed and are concerned that no one is talking about their experiences.

Refusing to declare his loyalty to Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Brasse was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 31, 1940. As a prisoner in Auschwitz, his role was to take photographs of fellow inmates at the death camp. He once said he photographed between 40,000 to 50,000 prisoners.

Brasse learnt photography from his aunt in Poland. As he was a skilled photographer and could speak German, he was appointed to create photographs for incoming prisoners identity cards.

“When they arrived at Auschwitz, people’s faces were full, they looked normal. Just weeks later, if they were still alive, they were unrecognizable.” Brasse told the AFP in a 2009 interview.

Before the Soviet army liberated the camp, Brasse was instructed to destroy all of the negatives, but he didn’t. A lot of the images are now on display at the Auschwitz museum. When Brasse returned to his home he wanted to continue taking photographs, but the experiences he had witnessed in Auschwitz were too haunting. “Those poor Jewish children were always before my eyes,” Brasse told AFP in 2009. “There are things you can never forget.”

Brasse’s photographs not only capture a moment in time, but also are part of history.

—

Written by Madeleine Wright, Youth Champion Board Member for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

madeleinegwright.wixsite.com/textiles

Find more information about the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust here: hmd.org.uk

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, fashion designer Christopher Shannon discusses growing up in Liverpool and the effect the city has had on his sense of style and self.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, stylist Simon Foxton discusses how his youth growing up in a hotel in Berwick has shaped his identity and practice.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Support Open Eye Gallery and buy an outstanding, yet affordable print by an exceptional artist.

Field Editions launched on home territory at The Manchester Contemporary Art Fair in September 2016, and launched internationally at Miami NADA in December 2016, with a well received presentation of exciting new photographic limited editions specially created and generously donated by alumni of Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Impressions Gallery, Bradford and Redeye, the Photography Network, Manchester.

Next stop NADA New York!

Artists who have contributed inaugural works to Field Editions include Murray Ballard, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Broomberg and Chanarin, Ben Rivers, Martin Parr, Helen Sear, John Stezaker and Eva Stenram among many others.

The aim of Field Editions is to offer a different and innovative approach to the collecting of contemporary photography and to showcase new and emerging talent along side well known contemporary artists.

All proceeds coming to Open Eye Gallery will be spent on supporting the next generation of photographers at crucial stages in their careers.

Field Editions is a consortium established in 2016 for the production of benefit editions to support the work of two charities, Open Eye Gallery , Liverpool and Impressions Gallery,  Bradford as well as Redeye, the Photography Network in Manchester.  These three organisations have between them over 100 year’s experience in championing the very best of contemporary photography, and of providing invaluable professional support to both emerging and established photographers.

Field Editions is committed to becoming a destination brand for the acquisition of the most outstanding, yet affordable, photographic limited editions available today.

Support Open Eye Gallery by collecting Field Editions prints:
www.fieldeditions.org/product-category/open-eye-gallery

Field Editions is supported by Arts Council England.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, designer Gareth Pugh discusses growing up in Sunderland, exploring landmarks that hold a nostalgic significance to his development as a designer.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, designer Claire Barrow discusses her memories of growing up in Yarm, and questions the effect of her youth on her current aesthetic.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, master milliner Stephen Jones discusses class divides in post-war Liverpool and creative influences in the North despite economic downturn.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, Liverpudlian stylist Thom Murphy describes the evolution of the club scene in the North of England and his subsequent trajectory into fashion.

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Co-curators Lou Stoppard & Adam Murray discuss some images of Liverpool that appear in our current exhibition, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion.

John Bulmer – Liverpool 1965

John Bulmer is a British photographer worker who produced a series of seminal reportage projects documenting Northern England in the 1960s and 70s for publications such as The Sunday Times. Bulmer’s work is important in this exhibition as it provides a comprehensive document of life and lays the foundations for some of the reoccurring motifs that we see in more recent fashion editorials. This particular image shot in Liverpool in 1965 depicts various themes Lou and I have explored in our research to do with housing, domesticity and the family.

– Adam Murray

David Sims – From Heaven Up Here. Liverpool Re-Visited 2006

This image is from a project photographed by David Sims and casting by Thom Murphy that first appeared in luxury fashion publication Self Service in 2006. A studio was set up in the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool and young women were photographed in the clothing they happened to be wearing that day. This is not a traditional fashion shoot in the way that a model is dressed with pre decided clothing. Rather, it is a celebration of personal style and the way clothing, make up, hair style and pose is used by each of us as means of expression.

– Adam Murray

Alice Hawkins – from The Liver Birds, 2013

Photographer Alice Hawkins is full of respect for her subjects and often plays with or challenges these stereotypes, celebrating the routines and rituals of British women. Highly influenced by Coronation Street and Bet Lynch, she seeks to shoot women ‘who don’t conform to a normal notion of beauty.’ She continues, ‘Lynch is the epitome of what I love and admire about women – women who are audacious in their appearance. They push what it is to be feminine beyond the realms of normal. Some people may consider them to look tacky or tasteless but I think they are dignified and I am completely genuine with my admiration and representation of them in my work. I have dreams to be like them myself.’ Here, glossy fashion bible LOVE commissioned her for this shoot starring Abbey Clancy and members of her extended clan. Their poise and vibrancy is striking.

– Lou Stoppard

Michelle Sank – Blaze, Dancer, Pierhead, 2007

The aspects of Northern culture that are most regularly taken up by the fashion press tend to relate mostly to subculture, music and sport. Therefore, often a highly masculine image dominates. During our research we were struck by these images by these 2007 images by Michelle Sank in the Open Eye archive that seemed to challenge these norms. 2007 marked the 800th birthday of the Borough of Liverpool and to celebrate the occasion Open Eye produced The Water’s Edge, a photographic commission, exhibition and book that explored the women who work, or worked, in and around the city’s waterfront, or who have departed from it to work at sea.

– Lou Stoppard

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2017.

A Utopian Stage: Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis
Curation and Research: Vali Mahlouji

The Festival of Arts was a performance festival held annually in Iran every summer between 1967-77 in and around the city of Shiraz and the ancient ruins of Persepolis. It facilitated a uniquely transformative and radical crucible of artistic exchange and experience. By the early ‘70s Shiraz-Persepolis had become a crucial player in a complex international network of creative expression circumventing divisions of North-South and South-South. In line with the Non-Aligned Movement, it articulated a Third World-ist post-colonial position and negotiated the ideological Cold War demarcations facilitating the exchange of information beyond the Iron Curtain.

Curated by Iranian intellectuals and in line with post-war anti-colonial sensibilities, the festival defied European hierarchical cultural models and discourses. In proposing a universalist model of culture, it put distant voices from Asia and Africa, often for the first time, on the cultural map as valid and equal. Artists found opportunities to investigate shared roots of drama, music and performance in rejecting the conventional definitions of traditional and modern, native and alien. Domestically, the festival opened up a transgressively liberal space within a dictatorship, which was perceived as culturally and politically controversial.

At the time of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a religious fatwa against the festival in 1978 declaring it culturally decadent and un-Islamic. Many of the Iranian participants were not allowed to work again and all records and materials associated with the festival in Iran remain banned to date.

A Utopian Stage is a project of Archaeology of the Final Decade, a curatorial platform founded in 2010, which researches histories of nations condemned by social displacement, cultural annihilation or deliberate disappearance. AOTFD engages with accounts of culture, which have been lost through material destruction, acts of censorship, political, economic or human contingencies. The research identifies, investigates and re-circulates significant cultural and artistic materials that have remained obscure, under-exposed, endangered, banned or in some instances destroyed.

—

A four channel video presentation of the Festival of Arts from the Archaeology of the Final Decade is now on display on our Digital Window Gallery. Booklets offering a fuller perspective on the project are available in our independent book shop.

Currently on display as part of North: Identity, Photography, Fashion are interviews from designers that hail from the North of England, who discuss the impact the region and their upbringing had on their creative output. Created by the team at SHOWstudio, a platform dedicated to fashion film and live media, these original commissions are available online on SHOWstudio’s North series, which corresponds with this exhibition and features additional contributions and writing.

In this video, adidas brand consultant Gary Aspden discusses the aspirational nature of sportswear and the class tourism inherent in casual fashion in the eighties

‘The real skill will be in learning to look beneath the clichés and habits of imagination that lie at the heart of these myths.’ Motivated by questioning existing depictions of the North of England in fashion imagery, SHOWstudio editor Lou Stoppard and Manchester-based academic and Preston is my Paris founder Adam Murray team up to unpick Northern identity, the effect of geographic space on creative output and the importance of place in general, amongst other things.

The online project encompasses interviews with key creative practitioners – including Simon Foxton, Claire Barrow and Gareth Pugh – who discuss the links between their creative practice and Northern upbringing, citing key spaces, locations, moments and figures. The interviews are displayed as videos created by Jon Emmony using Google Streetview as an immersive street-level documentation of contributors’ origins.

Additionally, essays and writing offer further discussion about the effect of geographic space on everything from gender roles to creative output. To involve those based in the North, select figures from across fashion set briefs to students studying Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University that demand that time be spent out and about engaging with the community and exploring areas of the North. Photographers Jamie Hawkesworth and Nina Manandhar encourage students to look closely at people, places and routines within the North, while curator Ben Whyman and Stoppard ask students to think about text, interiors and artistic outputs. The briefs were given to students in October 2015. They are included here, and the resultant work will also be published later in the year.

—

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues at Open Eye Gallery 6 January – 19 March 2016.

Thursday 5 January 2017 / 6pm-9pm

Speeches at 6:15pm from:

Simon Mellor
Deputy Chief Executive, Arts & Culture, Arts Council England

Cllr Wendy Simon
Assistant Mayor & Cabinet Member for Culture, Tourism & Events, Liverpool Labour

Sarah Fisher
Executive Director, Open Eye Gallery

Lou Stoppard
Curator, North: Fashion, Photography, Identity & Editor at SHOWstudio

Over the past 40 years, Open Eye Gallery has exhibited some of the world’s most inspiring and insightful photographers. We have championed the agency of photography as art, as social and historical document, and as integral to the cultural impact of music, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines.

We will be unveiling a brand new Wall Work featuring snapshot-quotes from 40 people who have shaped and grown the organisation, reflecting upon their experience of Open Eye Gallery.

We are delighted to launch our 40th birthday year with a brand new exhibition exploring the influence of the North of England on fashion and visual culture, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion.

The exhibition features work from some of fashion’s most notable image-makers. Early photography by Jamie Hawkesworth and Alasdair McLellan, dating back to the first years of their careers, is shown alongside historic prints from Glen Luchford and Nick Knight. Original prints from Luchford’s first ever shoot, a session with The Stone Roses for The Face in 1989, will be on display. Additionally, work by contemporary artists such as Turner Prize winners Mark Leckey and Jeremy Deller will be exhibited.

Co-curated by Lou Stoppard and Adam Murray.

Featured artists are Alasdair McLellan, Glen Luchford, Corinne Day, David Sims, Jamie Hawkesworth, Jason Evans, Alice Hawkins, Mark Leckey, Jeremy Deller, Raf Simons, Paul Smith, Virgil Abloh, New Power Studio, adidas, Elaine Constantine, Christopher Shannon, Maxwell Sterling, Simon Foxton, Ben Kelly, Stephen Jones, Gareth Pugh, Nick Knight, Peter Saville, John Bulmer, Peter Mitchell, Nik Hartley, Claire Barrow, Humphrey Spender, Thom Murphy, Ewen Spencer, Brett Dee, Humphrey Jennings, Dave Turner, Rob Williams, David Ellison, Scott King, Shirley Baker, Greg Leach, John Davies, John Stoddart, Martin Roberts, Michael Robinson, Michelle Sank, Paul O’Donnell, Stephen McCoy, Tom Wood, John Skelton.

Kindly supported by adidas.

Exhibition continues 6 January – 19 March 2017.

Join us for an exciting year ahead as we launch our 40th birthday celebrations, 1977-2017.

Over this 40 year period, Open Eye Gallery has exhibited some of the world’s most inspiring and insightful photographers. We have championed the agency of photography as art, as social and historical document, and as integral to the cultural impact of music, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines.

In 2017, Open Eye Gallery will be celebrating our deep connection to place. Working in partnership, we explore the visual identity of the North, the City as a site for global exchange, the history and future of counter culture and the people & communities of our City Region.

The external wall of Open Eye Gallery is made from a workable material called Corian. In the past, paint has been fired at the gallery (Walter & Zoniel: Spectra), sculptures have protruded from the walls (Emily Speed: Nothing Is Finished, Nothing Is Perfect, Nothing Lasts) and the exterior has beed ‘dazzled’ (S Mark Gubb: Good Sailing…)

In 2017, Open Eye Gallery celebrates its 40th Birthday Year (1977-2017). Our success is down to the many people who have shaped and grown the organisation. The new Wall Work features snapshot-quotes from 40 people reflecting upon their experience of Open Eye Gallery.

Shaped by our Research Curator and oral historian Dan Warner, and designed by Thom Isom, through the 2017 facade of the gallery we wish to pay homage to a much larger group of photographers, volunteers, partners, visitors and staff who have championed our work.

The new Wall Work, 40 Years of Open Eye Gallery: 1977-2017, will be unveiled on Thursday 5 January, 6-9pm.

#OEG40

40 Years of Open Eye Gallery: 1977-2017

Colin Wilkinson, Founder of Open Eye Gallery
“Open Eye Gallery, where I… was dynamic. We were doing an exhibition a month. It wasn’t madness – it was exciting. Opportunities came up and we took them.” – 1978

Mandy, Visitor
“Open Eye Gallery, where I… protested against an exhibition. Myself and other feminists sprayed shaving foam on some quite graphic images of women.” – 1980

Martin Parr, Photographer
“Open Eye Gallery, where I… exhibited The Last Resort with Tom Wood. The Gallery was a nice place to go. It was what you might call shabby chic, but it worked and functioned well and the show got a good response.” – 1986

Simon Norfolk, Photographer
“Open Eye Gallery, where I… discovered photography was what I’d do for the rest of my life. Having a voice that people want to hear is a rare privilege.” – 1999

Debbie Chan, Previous member of staff
“Open Eye Gallery, where I…got my first full-time job as trainee programme assistant. A significant occasion, because my Chinese parents always supported my madness for the arts, but never knew how.” – 2000

Tim Riley, Architect (Mann Island gallery)
Open Eye Gallery, where I…felt immense pride to be told that the design had captured the spirit of the Gallery and continued to provoke and engage the people of the city.” – 2011

Phoebe Kiely, Photographer
“Open Eye Gallery, where I…was given my first exhibition. I was given a voice throughout. I grew more as an artist during that exhibition than I ever had before.” – 2016

Over this 40 year period, we have exhibited some of the world’s most inspiring and insightful photographers. We have championed the agency of photography as art, as social and historical document, and as integral to the cultural impact of music, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines.

In January 2017 we will be unveiling a brand new Wall Work featuring snapshot-quotes from 40 photographers, volunteers, partners, visitors and staff who have championed our work.

We will also be opening a brand new exhibition exploring the influence of the North of England on fashion and visual culture, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion.

Reflecting on the potentials and the tensions of photography as a collaborative practice…

As we reflect back on the first 6 months of the Culture Shifts programme, we say a fond farewell to a 2016 full of new relationships, friendships, networks and contemplation between the ever-shifting role of photography and society.

Some of our Culture Shifts photographers have been working with specific individuals and community groups across Merseyside, embedding themselves within the community setting whilst others have only just started to meet new faces and hear new stories.

What has become clear from the projects, which have developed over the past few months, is a genuine interest from both the community and photographer to want to continue their conversations. Often with residencies with restricted timelines you can feel like you are only just scratching the surface of a narrative, and with each encounter and conversation you unearth hidden connections to more people and places, and new subject matters and areas of interests which both the photographer and community alike want to delve deeper into.

Photographer Tony Mallon, for example has met with the Northwood’s Golden age women’s group for over a number of weeks now. Some of the women are particularly keen to develop a skills exchange between themselves and the photographer; Tony offering the photography skills, the women offering a huge and personal insight into the history of their area. Some of the women are more focused on exploring self-representation, and Mallon himself has reflected on how first impressions can always be misleading. What seems to have struck him most is the perception of an older women’s community as a group of women who are more fragile or vulnerable, but Mallon has been completely struck by the vitality and active community lifestyle these women hold dear to Northwoods. He hopes to explore these ideas further through collaborative portraiture over the next few months. The residency has also allowed Mallon to reflect on his own relationship to the area, with Northwoods being his local hometown until he turned 18. The women are a reminder of what was but also a welcome new perspective of a place he once called home.

Mallon is not the only photographer to re-trace connections to the community he is collaborating with. Both photographer and filmmaker Andrew Jackson and Darryl Georgiou (and supported by film maker Rebekah Tolley), have been meeting the individual residents and shop keepers of the Granby area, Toxteth. With a recent media spotlight shining on the Granby 4Streets CLT, post hosting a Turner Prize winning project with art collective Assemble, the photographers have been revisiting the individuals who actually make up the fabric of the area, each with their own stories, histories and perspectives from communities both “lost and forgotten” and the “here and now”. Upon this dialogue and interaction with local residents, both Jackson and Georgiou both living in Birmingham, have found personal friend and family connections to the area, almost as if this has been a hidden calling card home.

These relationships and discovered narratives about people and place have created a rich tapestry of new photographic work, but with these new connections and stories, comes its own challenges. Photographers invited to work in a new community context can often feel in a limbo position between commissioner and community, with multiple agendas pulling the photographers eye and priorities from one side to the next.

There can be a pressure of high expectations from both ends for the photographer to deliver something “authentic” about the collaborative experience but the very nature of asking an outsider to engage with a new community can create its own inherent artificial feelings. But hasn’t that always been the role of a photographer in many ways, to be that guest, that outside visitor to a new setting, reflecting back through the lens of what he/she seems before them and sharing with others? Whilst this can suggest a somewhat single perspective view, the beauty of the Culture Shifts programme is that the photographers are invited to collaborate with the community directly on what is being reflected and how, inviting a series of subjective responses from different individuals and creating a bigger picture of what their community really means to them.

This still doesn’t mean high expectations aren’t still placed on the photographer as in some instances what the community or individuals want to explore through their photo stories are massive subjects in their own right. Colin McPherson, for example, has been invited to work with a group of young people living in Sefton, interested in reflecting what really matters to the younger generation in that area. The young people want to explore some major topics such as breaking down stigma’s attached to labeling, body image and gender identity as well as raising issues around mental health, sexual health and curriculum for life. Each one of these topics could be explored for a lifetime, but together with the young people of Sefton, McPherson has the challenging but exciting role of summarising these topics into a concise series of impactful photographs.

The photographers of the Culture Shifts programme reflect some wider topics currently in debate across the photography and socially engaged network of practitioners in the UK. After visiting a recent lecture by photographer Anthony Luvera, around photography as a collaborative practice, some similar themes seem to be resonating around this type of photographic work. What do we really mean by co-authored images? Does work need to be co-created to be co-authored, who needs to physically be making the photograph to suggest the process has been collaborative, and what are the tension lines between process V’s product? As Luvera suggested “there is always a tension around the potential powers and problems of representation” even more so with photography, a medium which often associates itself with the individual on-looker’s lens. However, photography by its very nature was created as a means of representation, reflecting something more democratic, a reproduction of what we see before us. A theorist and writer, Jacques Rancière describes photography as a ‘reflection on the true’. He talks about photography’s role to shift the focus of what we represent from only the “great names and events of history to the life of the (often) anonymous… it finds society, or a civilisations… in capturing the minute details of ordinary life”. In an era of social media and mass participation, photography now more than ever, takes on this mass democratic role of self-representation. So just think what can happen when photographers and communities come together to expand and create images of their own lives.

What seems clear from the Culture Shifts programme to date, is that there is no one set answer in terms of approach to co-creation at least, and that the nature of the collaboration has to come down to the context with its community and setting. In the case of Tadhg Devlin’s recent collaboration with individuals from the SURF Dementia Network group, it became very clear that these individuals wanted to share their personal stories, and how they live with a specific condition not just the condition itself. In order for this to be realised, it was crucial the individuals shared their own story by becoming the subject matter of their own visual narrative – with Tadhg using his photographic skills to animate these individual stories shared between photographer and the SURF group over a number of months. In this sense, a true collaboration emerged between photographer and individual, co-designing, performing and capturing a series of photo stories. A unique series of photographs have been created, and ones which represent individual stories which never would have been realised in such a powerful way if not for the pairing of photographer and group.

Whether the Culture Shifts projects have just started, or nearing their completion, they all feel like they have just hit the tip of the iceberg of a bigger on-going conversation between photographer and community. It is not only community groups and individuals from projects so far who have suggested wanting to explore ideas and images further, but a desire from the photographers involved, to find out more more about themselves as practitioners through these collaborative roles.

We a wait with great anticipation and excitement, to see what type of collaborative approaches will emerge from our Culture Shifts partnerships and which new stories will be shared in 2017.

—

Written by Liz Wewiora
Culture Shifts Creative Producer

Open Eye Gallery is now closed to the public whilst we install our next exhibitions.

Please join us for our 2017 Launch Night, Thursday 5 January, 6-9pm.

In 2017 Open Eye Gallery celebrates it’s 40th Birthday Year!

Over this 40 year period, Open Eye Gallery has exhibited some of the world’s most inspiring and insightful photographers. We have championed the agency of photography as art, as social and historical document, and as integral to the cultural impact of music, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines.

We will be unveiling a brand new Wall Work featuring snapshot-quotes from 40 people who have shaped and grown the organisation, reflecting upon their experience of Open Eye Gallery.

We are delighted to launch our 40th birthday year with a brand new exhibition exploring the influence of the North of England on fashion and visual culture, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion.

The exhibition features work from some of fashion’s most notable image-makers. Early photography by Jamie Hawkesworth and Alasdair McLellan, dating back to the first years of their careers, is shown alongside historic prints from Glen Luchford and Nick Knight. Original prints from Luchford’s first ever shoot, a session with The Stone Roses for The Face in 1989, will be on display. Additionally, work by contemporary artists such as Turner Prize winners Mark Leckey and Jeremy Deller will be exhibited.

Co-curated by Lou Stoppard and Adam Murray.

Exhibition Continues:
6 January – 19 March 2017

Check our social media platforms for regular updates #JPA2015
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Some thoughts on Joanna Pietrowska’s Jerwood-Photoworks exhibition

By Pauline Rowe, Open Eye Gallery’s Writer in Residence

How do we respond to the gestures and poses of the human body, especially when the body gazed upon is young and female? This is one aspect of provocation in Joanna Pietrowski’s award-winning exhibition (28 Oct – 18 Dec 2016) at Open Eye Gallery and for which she won an inaugural Jerwood-Photoworks award in 2015.

In Gallery One there are four large photographs free standing on white, wooden, portable, wheeled structures (mini billboards), and each image is mounted on uncovered metal with the frame at the back of the photograph. On one side we see framed metal, on the other an unframed black and white image. The metal suggests shadow but does not offer a clear reflection of the observer.

On the first free-standing bill-board there are two teenage girls sitting on a wicker garden sofa, on wooden decking, framed to the right by an evergreen hedge; one of the girls is in a conventional sitting pose, feet to the floor with her face (hidden by her hair) turned towards the second girl who is sitting with her back against the right arm of the sofa, her legs across the first girl’s knees, her head thrown back and her eyes covered by the first girl’s left hand, which is placed in such a way to suggest a pressing down.   Their legs and feet are bare and they are dressed in simple shorts and short-sleeved T-shirts, the first girl in a pale T-shirt, and for the second girl, both garments are black.   The first girl holds the second girl’s right leg at the back of her calf and the second girl’s right arm is placed around the others neck as it reaches to touch the tips of her own left hand. Both bodies are connected and choreographed as though playing some strange version of statues in which the face must not be shown, where no music is played.

The second free-standing photograph is of a different girl lounging on a mattress that is against a wall. Above the figure and adjacent to the mattress is a floating curtain, although we cannot see a window.   Behind the girl is part of a hanging rug and a small framed painting of a parrot. The girl is leaning against a floral cushion in a contorted pose, her right leg bent and right foot underneath her left leg, her left elbow pointing outwards as her arm clutches her body. Her head is tilted to the right and her right arm is bent over her head and holds her own chin. Her eyes are looking down. It is as though she grabs at her own head, as her left arm tries to protect her body. This is not a story. Her gestures are in opposition in the one body. The figure’s pose is so strange one feels compelled to mimick it and no matter how hard I try I can’t do so. Perhaps one must be a girl to accomplish this staged eeriness in the body.

The third fee-standing image reminded me of the spider-walking scene from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and is recorded in my notebook as “exorcist girl on patterned paving or driveway (large)”. The image is split into a dark backdrop and light pavement with the girl just off-centre holding herself up, on her right hand and left elbow in the shape of a walking crab with her hair falling to the pavement. Her body is twisted and her left leg bent (foot flat to the ground). We cannot see her right leg as it is covered by her body.

The fourth fee-standing image shows a girl, her long hair loose past her shoulders, sitting at a dining table. Behind her is a wall of cupboards and between the cupboards and the table to her right is an old fashioned standard lamp, its pale drum shade edged with brocade. The girl is facing us but her face is partially covered by her raised right hand, palm facing outwards, fingers slightly curved. We can, perhaps see a sliver of her eye suggesting she can see through her fingers. The lighting throws a close shadow outline of her silhouette just to the right of her frame. The table is covered in a checked table cloth which I imagine is red and white.

On the walls are four different sized images.   On the right hand wall as one goes into Gallery One is a collage of six images of a girl in interior space (a domestic setting) posed in various shapes, one of which shows a girl in pyjamas balancing on one leg leaning over to the left with her right leg in the air and her right hand touching what looks like a television table. There’s a close silhouette shadow cast on the net curtains in front of her. Her left arm is not visible. She must be holding it in to her body.   On the opposite wall is a smaller image of a mature woman standing, pressing her closed, ringed left hand against the girl’s forehead. The woman wears a smug smile and has her eyes closed. We can see just the left profile of her face and her left arm, and the shadows of both. The girl is sitting looks at the woman – we see her in profile. Her small cleavage is visible as she is wearing a sleeveless summer top. We can see the straps of an undergarment too. She may have been out in the sun but this is not a story. She has short bobbed hair and looks as if she is used to punishment.   There is also a much smaller image on the wall facing the gallery entrance of a combination of two pairs of arms and hands.   They seem like children’s arms, and the proximity with the other images suggests the arms of girls. They could have been engaged in a game of arm wrestling as the arms to the left are joined by hands, left hand over right and the arms to the right are holding the other girl, one hand holding her opponent by the wrist and the other hand holding lower down the arm. It is oppositional and strange to see limbs in such relation. The final image in this exhibition shows two girls outside by a pond, one is lying down and the other stands over her. There is a suggestion of domination and submission, power and violence and a sense of stagnancy in the backdrop of the pond.

These strange and difficult images resist narrative. They are theatrical stagings of still moments of conflict that illustrate power relationships. They present the vulnerabilities and difficulties of young female bodies and make us as observers implicit in the power relations they depict. They make poses in domestic settings that have a museum feel about them. Just beneath the surface we sense unease and danger. We know those staged rehearsals of hands and grip, balance and poise will protect no one.

By Pauline Rowe, Open Eye Gallery’s Writer in Residence

—

Don’t miss the last week of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015 at Ope Eye Gallery! The exhibition closes on Sunday 18th December at 5:30pm.

Matthew Finn has been photographing his mother in a series of collaborative portraits since 1987. Joanna Piotrowska’s work explores anxiety and the effects of global and political events on the individual. Tereza Zelenkova has travelled to her native Czech Republic to explore themes of history, local legend and folklore.

Faithful OEG followers will know we have been mentioning our ‘independent book shop’ as often as we can (apologies!) but the team here is really quite proud of it. So proud, if fact that we thought a virtual tour would be a fantastic idea!

Without further ado…

As the only dedicated contemporary photographic gallery here in the dark and rain-soaked North, we think it is hugely important to point a torch towards local artists, be they established photographers or fresh out of university. If the work adds to the discussion about contemporary art, we stand firmly behind it and think it rightly deserves a place on our shelf or feature walls.

Section 2 is a completely different animal – this space is reserved only for independent publishers, such as MACK, and Fistful of Books. Expect more experimental, wacky and highly emotive projects not restrained by larger corporations in the forms of lovingly cloth-bound hardbacks and small edition zines. With such a range of massively differing titles, this is a good spot for a rummage through lesser-known names.

Browse through contemporary work from the likes of British Journal of Photography, Hotshoe, Aesthetica and fresh talent: Gravy Photographic. If your thirst for knowledge is left unquenched, there is always space on our theory shelf for the classics. From Susan Sontag to Friedrich Nietzsche, we have you covered.

Next, we have our local interest area; dedicated to established and up-and-coming local photographers or image-makers that turn their eye to UK soil. We have a wide variety of Craig Atkinson’s highly collectable publishing project: Café Royal Books alongside the work of Liverpool photographers Ken Grant, Dave Sinclair and more. All of this is only one part of our small-but-perfectly-formed independent shop!

Bright kids will love OKIDO, the arts and science magazine, and story-telling dice in our range for smaller hands. From shadow puppet theatres to 15ft concertina colouring books; we have the perfect gift to feed your child’s creativity.

Our cabinet is brimming with specialised, colourful analogue cameras and accessories (please ask about them!), featuring Lomography, Polaroid and DIY pinhole cameras. You are going to need film to feed, and luckily enough we have a whole stockpile of classics including Tri-X, Portra and Ilford HP5 amongst more rare and expired films to experiment with, such as special edition Impossible Polaroid film and turquoise tinted Lomo film.

Open Eye Gallery support and actively encourage artists of all ages and disciplines, and we endeavor to bring to our visitors a curated library of materials to do just that. Come in and have a look!

Visit our independent shop Tuesday-Sunday, 10:30am-5:30pm.
Students receive 10% off on presentation of a valid student card.

Written By Declan Connolly

#TateExchange   #CultureShifts

Get involved with Culture Shifts at Tate Exchange Liverpool, Sunday 27th, Monday 28th and Tuesday 29th November 2016.

Open Eye Gallery is working across Merseyside on a new socially engaged photographic programme Culture Shifts. This Tate Exchange Liverpool event showcases the first collaborative project.

Liverpool based photographer Tadhg Devlin has been working in collaboration with the Dementia SURF (Service User Reference Forum) group, supported by Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. The group has a strong track record as ambassadors for those living with early on set dementia. A number of the group have been working closely with Devlin to create Photo Stories which break the stigma associated with dementia, and reflect their lives as individuals, not as a condition.

At Tate Exchange Liverpool, Culture Shifts will showcase a series of photographic works and a creative newspaper. The newspaper acts as an artwork in its own right and as well as an alternative piece of interpretation about living with dementia and the individual stories of the SURF group members.

Culture Shifts will also host a series of events led by the SURF group as well as various guest speakers from the Arts, Health and Care sector. We aim to open up dialogue around Arts and Health and raise awareness around dementia in a creative and engaging way.

Find out more here: www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/workshop/tate-exchange/culture-shifts-open-eye-gallery-surf-and-tadhg-devlin

We concentrated on Matthew Finn’s exhibition for our second Autumn workshop, reading Seamus Heaney’s lines from Clearances that begin, like so many of Matthew’s photographs, in the kitchen:

When all the other were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes…

We were in the company of a very different mother with Julia Kaldorf:

 

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital…

and with Ruby Robinson we meet a mother and daughter on a sad yet momentous day out, a day of escape from the psychiatric unit:

…She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God

because she didn’t want to go to hell, although,

she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell

already, haven’t we..

And we saw the frail ageing and motherly concern in the elderly mother in Richard Jarette’s My Mother Worries About My Heart.

There was a sort of mediation between the poems we read aloud and then the reverence with which we looked at Matthew’s photographs each of us contemplating what it means to be an adult child, to have a mother, all those things unspoken, unsayable.

We finished with our own messages for our mothers, one of which, by Gareth Roberts, read:

I’m inspired by the way you coped with Dad’s death.

I’m inspired by the way you set about reinventing yourself.

I’m inspired by the way you used technology to find someone.

I’m inspired that I can’t spend Christmas with you.

I’m inspired that you are happy again.

For links to the poems we read for Mother:

From Clearances by Seamus Heaney

https://apoemforireland.rte.ie/shortlist/clearances/

What I learned from My Mother by Julia Kaldorf

http://etyistheword.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/what-i-learned-from-my-mother-julia.html

My Mother Worries About My Hat by Richard Jarette

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/detail/572

My Mother by Ruby Robinson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/57459

It was an icy, misty night by the river when eleven of us met to consider Tereza Zelenkova’s haunting landscapes and portraits of hidden places taken in her native Czech Republic. We took the opportunity to absorb the unhomely atmosphere of her dark stories and images and read together The Witches Song from Macbeth:

Double, Double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble…

We also read The Listeners by Walter de la Mare taking lines one voice at a time rather than collectively:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller

Knocking on the moonlit door…

It would not have surprised any of us if the Traveller had stopped within one of Tereza’s landscapes, within the forest.

From Rae Armantrout’s poem Djinn we contemplated the lines:

Many whisper

white lies

to the dead.

 

“The boys are doing really well”

 

Some think

nothing is so

until it has been witnessed…

We dreamed our own memories out of Louise Gluck’s poem All Hallows

     …. Come here

           Come here, little one

   

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Each one of us chose one picture that called to us or struck us in some way – why or how is difficult to articulate but there were certain images that touched us collectively: the four women with covered heads around the table, the rock with a creaturely face, the tree growing around the crucifix. All of us were affected by the mysteries and plaintive qualities of Tereza’s work.

We collaborated on a written response to Tereza’s ideas of homeland by contemplating what a portrait of Britain might look like:

          A Portrait of My Home Country

 

Home is buttered toast

under a blanket, in bed.

No one hears the young

men on the street trying

to sleep in bags,

asking for change.

On the Wirral, lost, I listen

seek with my ears the voice

of the Green Knight.

A proud past long since

gone, future unsure, we are

of today.

Cold but bright, busy

but happy

 

            with river-laced arsenic

choking ionide streams.

A two-way mirror

splattered with slime.

Forgotten unwanted industry,

forgotten unwanted people

steel faces, steel cities, steel nerves

a modern dockland clings to history.

A group poem by:

James Borner, Louise Stewart, Susan Comer, Paula Frew, Megan Holt,

Marielle Matthee, Lewis Johnson, Paula Pritchard, Louis Tuckman, Brendan Curtis.

Poems we read for Ghosts in the Landscape:

Witches Song – from Macbeth

https://allpoetry.com/Witches’-Chant-(from-Macbeth)

The Traveller by Walter de la Mare

http://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/wp/poem/the-listeners/

Djinn by Rae Armantrout: http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/18005

All Hallows by Louise Gluck

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49605

In our independent bookshop we have lots of photo books from the publisher MACK, here is a closer look at three of the new additions to our ever growing shop.

Girl Plays with Snake, Clare Strand, £30.00

The artist behind this clean cut scrap book containing found photographs of snakes is British conceptual artist Clare Strand. Strand has an interest in found photography and the shape-shifting nature photographs can have depending on their context. In an interview with i-D magazine the artist reveled the inspiration for the book came from her daughter who came home from school one day declaring that she had held a snake. Strand turned to her archive of found photographs and selected ones that featured women and yes, you guessed it, snakes. The book features bizarre photographs of amusing situations, one of my favorites is of a woman hanging out of a car window posing happily with a snake. As stated on the artists website, Clare Strand would like to make it very clear that she is not a lover of snakes.

ZZYZX, Gregory Halpern, £35.00

Taking its title from the town of Zzyzx in California, Gregory Halpern’s collection of photographs taken around Los Angeles evokes a sense of a dystopian future. When selecting images for the book Halpern trawled through an estimated thousand rolls of film, all which were shot between 2008 and 2015. The result a carefully curated selection of individual photographs that form a liner story in which we follow on a journey from east to west California.

Provisional Arrangement, Martin Kollar, £25.00

Martin Kollar was the first winner if the Prix Elysée in 2015, with his £55,000 prize he put half of it towards the production of his project Provisional Arrangement. The Slovakian artist grew up during the communist era under the slogan “With the Soviet Union for all Eternity”, like many of his generation the provisional ruled the everyday. As seen though his practise Kollar is interested with the temporary world in which he now exists, and how he is constantly adapting himself to endless variations. Provisional Arrangement has no supporting text, the reader is expected to form their own narratives and own paths of possibilities.

Spend £50 or more on MACK books and receive a free goodie bag that contains a MACK sketchbook and a MACK catalogue.

—

Written by Holly Christopher

Open Eye Gallery simply loves Lomography! A glancer into the independent shop and you will notice a whole cabinet full of colourful, playful photographic toys, many of which have achieved a cult following as analogue is becoming more and more fashionable.

It is easy to wonder why Lomography has become so popular – in a world of full-auto and instant upload, why would anybody want to constrain themselves to the long process of shooting film, never mind with a plastic lens! The ethos is this: photography should be as fun as it is limitless. I am reminded of Lomography’s philosophy by the relief text on the back of my own beaten up Golden Half camera, which enthusiastically exclaims

“So throw away your book and why don’t you go out!”

With such vigour, I am often persuaded.

Lomography cameras are purely mechanical; there are no electronic parts whatsoever so being left in the rain or snow is simply not an issue and when dropped, they bounce. What Lomography actively does is dismiss any excuse for not taking pictures; they are some of the most simplistic machines available and produce images that are raw (not .raw, but RAW!) and so devoid of the usual digital algorithms that each image simply oozes character. These machines are to be used to effectively break down the stereotypes of precise, modern photography and also photographic tradition as a whole. It means to take the craft of photography away from the camera and into a way of recognition of an image. The absolute essence of image making is thrust somewhat forcibly, and definitely crudely, into the hands of the photographer.

Look a little closer at the Lomography cabinet and perhaps you will see a new orange box winking at you. This is known as the ‘La Sardina’, aptly named for its sardine-can appearance. The specific name of this odd, orange snakeskin camera is Orinoco Ochre and it comes with a matching orange Fritz the Blitz flash and multiple colour filters to create some truly strange effects. Certainly, this limited edition unit is an attention snatcher and acts as a perfect icebreaker for those impromptu street portraits.

There are two shutterspeed settings, N or B – that is 1/100 or Bulb. Using the Bulb setting, the film can be exposed to the chosen subject for an infinite amount of time meaning that this camera, simple as it may be, is great for street photography but also good for photographing the stars or, given its 22mm manual focus lens, even the Milky Way. The inclusion of an MX switch also makes creating multiple exposures impossibly easy. The Orinoco Ochre is well designed, simple to operate and an absolute pleasure to use!

Since orange is the theme, Open Eye Gallery now stock Lomography Redscale XR 50-200 35mm film (which bathes the subject in a deep, warm glow (how autumnal!) due to the negative film being traditionally loaded backwards into the canister. Being ranged between ASA 50-200 and with 36 full frame exposures, this is a significantly versatile film stock. Whilst rated at it’s native 200ASA, the orange and red tones are more prominent but rated more towards 50ASA the hues become less intense and more subtly introduce blue tones into the image. Being developed via C-41, redscale is really easy to process for such a strange effect.

La Sardina Reptilla Orinoco Ochre is available to buy from our shop for £99.99.

Redscale XR 50-200 35mm film x3 pack is also available to buy from our shop for £11.90

Photoworks Photography, Art, Culture_Issue 22: Women- £20

Issue 22 of Photoworks Annual looks at women and their roles in photography. It draws out thematic relationships between women and photography, looks at women from all different ages and backgrounds and includes some of the issues that women face in today’s society. It also talks about the use of photography in the media. Some of the contributors in this book include, Lucy-Anne Holmes, Grafik Magazine’s Angharad Lewis, Harriet Riches and many more.

One of the contributing artists in this issue is Marianna Rothen. She is based in New York and has had her work displayed in a number of exhibitions including 2016 – Salon Zurcher Photo, New York, and 2016 – Photo London, London, UK. Marianna Rothen originally started out as a model when she was 15, during this time she travelled and took pictures as she did so. After, Rothen thought that she wanted to become a fashion photographer. She told AnOther magazine “In the beginning I thought I wanted to be a fashion photographer…but then I realised that the best images I took were the ones I’d got by myself, working with my own ideas.”

As well as having various exhibitions, Marianna Rothen also has her own instagram page in which she post her own work in an attempt to promote herself further. She posts photos that show typical women’s body image. On top of this, Rothen also has her own website where she posts her past and future exhibitions dates and locations.

In this book Rothen’s photos capture what it is like to be a women in this modern era. She has managed to capture how women are expected to be. With the continual growth in social media women are exposed to the unrealistic expectations of how women should be. Women are constantly reminded of the ‘perfect body’ as they see celebrities with perfectly constructed Breasts, full lips, long hair and fluttery eyelashes, when in reality they have spend thousands of pounds on surgery and extensions. This would mean that women are idolising and aspiring to be something that isn’t real.

Photoworks issue 22, addresses the current fashion for fakery and allows women to understand that they do not need to conform to the fake expectations set and created by the media.

Photoworks Photography, Art, Culture_Issue 22: Women is available in our shop for £20.

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Written by Amy Williamson

Ken. To be destroyed by Sara Davidmann

Review by Stephen Clarke

Most letters are addressed to a named reader, an intended recipient of the writer’s message. Many of these communications are private. Love letters in particular demand intimacy, and so unauthorized reading becomes an act of trespass. This discretionary principle can also be applied to photographs. Sara Davidmann’s project began with the discovery of two large envelopes and a brown bag that were in a chest of drawers in her mother’s garage. Marked on both of the envelopes was the directive: ‘To be destroyed’. Contained inside were the private correspondence between Davidmann’s mother, aunt and uncle. Authority, through inheritance, passed to the daughter to question the contents and interpret the instruction.

Davidmann, Senior Research Fellow in Photography at the London College of Communication, is a member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC). Within the remit of the Centre’s academic concern the Davidmann family’s archive became appropriate material for sympathetic scrutiny by the artist/researcher. In a brief section towards the end of the book titled History of a Project, Davidmann guides the reader through the evolution of her exploration. From the artist inheriting the family archive in 2011, through to working alongside Val Williams (Director of PARC) and Robin Christian (PARC’s then Project Manager), to publishing a selection of letters and images in Fieldstudy 19 (2014), the Research Centre’s own publication. Following this Sara Davidmann and Val Williams began work on the book Ken. To be destroyed (2016) that has been published by Schilt Publishing.

Williams, credited as the editor of the book, provides the opening essay Secrets and Scraps. The secrets that this collection holds are revealed through the unraveling history of the troubled relationship between Hazel Houston – Davidmann’s aunt on her mother’s side – and her husband Ken Houston, as Hazel comes to terms with Ken’s self-identity as transgender. Letters and ephemera are the scraps that Davidmann uses to piece together this story. The correspondence between Hazel and her sister Audrey, and between Hazel and Ken, is the script for this narrative, as well as a point of reference for Williams’ essay. As Williams notes it is unclear what is left out of this archive and so what the reader is presented with is inconclusive. It is this fracturing of Sara Davidmann’s familial identity that gives moral context to public exposure of this material. The story is not just about Ken and Hazel but also the family as a whole. Davidmann’s family extends beyond that of her blood relations. The antecedent to Ken. To be destroyed is her work with the UK transgender and queer communities during the last fifteen years. In the essay included in Fieldstudy 19 Davidmann argues that her responsibilities to Ken lie with this other ‘family’ that her uncle was naturally a part.

Images in this extensive project are organized into series and fabricated using existing photographs. Davidmann adopts an approach to this material that is common amongst contemporary artists working with archives; using a combination of physical and digital processes she has altered the original photographs. An early series, The Dress, draws attention to a dress worn by Hazel. In these pictures the head of Davidmann’s aunt is erased by a covering of ink, chalk, magic markers and correction fluid. The headless dress stands in for a traumatized Hazel or perhaps, potentially, a transformed Ken. The physicality of the photographs is emphasized in the series Closer that enlarges the actual skin of the photograph noting its imperfections, hinting at what lies beneath the images of Ken and Hazel as a couple. The series Looking for K/Finding K visualizes Ken in the feminine role. These hand-tinted montages are the rose-tinted dream of transformation from man to the woman he may have wanted to become. In the melancholic series For K Davidmann’s uncle seemingly dissolves in the fluid alterations of her chemigram processes. The most recent part of the project is a collaboration with Graham Goldwater simply titled Archive. Images of the found papers in their bundles tied with string or bands show the viewer the physical substance that Davidmann is wrestling meaning from.

Throughout this book are reproductions of personal letters, family photographs and ephemera, such as envelopes and dance cards; these are interspersed among Davidmann’s explanatory comments and her artworks. The book closes with transcripts of selected letters, some of which are love letters, that Ken Houston sent to Hazel. Reading such intimate correspondence provokes unease in the understanding that this dialogue was not meant for anyone else but Hazel. It is from this juncture, where the private becomes public, that the project derives its tension. The letters, photographs and ephemera belong to Davidmann and her family – these are her family’s heirlooms. As a sibling Sara Davidmann came to an agreement with her brother and sister in relation to the exhibition and publication of the material. Whilst they were unhappy that Ken’s transgender identity would become publically known they gave their permission for the archive to be displayed, however, this was on condition that they themselves would remain unnamed and would not be included in the photographs. This agreement gives Davidmann the authority to explore and expose the archive but one question stays unanswered: Would Ken have wanted his – and Hazel’s – story told or would he have preferred the archive ‘to be destroyed’?

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Ken. To be destroyed. by Sara Davidmann (2016) is published by Schilt Publishing.
Hardcover with dustjacket, 120 pages, 113 images, £35.00 retail
ISBN 978 90 5330 861 5

The exhibition Ken. To be Destroyed is showing at the Schwules Museum, Berlin until October 2016.

The author Stephen Clarke is an artist, writer and lecturer based in the North West.

The article Alien Resident: Searching for San Diego by Julia García Hernández and Stephen Clarke on Clarke’s 1980s photographs of Southern California was published in The Royal Photographic Society’s Contemporary Journal No. 63, Spring 2016, pp 12-15. It is available to view at: https://issuu.com/bjsdesign/docs/spring_2016_journal_final__for_issu

Stephen Clarke’s photobook a strange field produced in collaboration with book artist Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (Sequential Press) was on show at Impressions Book Art 2016, Ireland from July 11- 24 2016. See Issue 105 of UWE’s Book Art Newsletter p.60: www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/newsletters.html

The Prospect of Immortality by Murray Ballard – £35

The unmistakable and unavoidable aspect of survival is the understanding that our time, and body is limited and should ultimately end. The notion of death is something that quite rightly produces a natural fear, which has actively kept the current species of the world alive. To be alive is to understand the concept of death – it is understandable therefore that many people live a large portion of their life in fear.

The concept of ultimate survival is a seductive one; it is that primordial, unquestionable success of both species and individual – so, as technologies become more advanced, and natural lifespans are at their peak, it seems to make sense that people are inclined to go about extending their time here.

In 1962 a man named Robert Ettinger published a book on a subject that would become ingrained in the lore of modern fiction and in the pursuits of contemporary science: cryogenics. This book would later be translated into nine languages and in several editions. The work of Ettinger has been reduced by some to simple romanticism, and whilst it would be hard to describe the ideology of cryogenics as anything unromantic, it cannot be said that the theories and experiments put forward are unimportant – be that in terms of science, theology or ethical debate.

Today, one is more likely to be talking about cryogenics in works of fiction or thought experiments as available technology lags behind somewhat from the technological utopia cryogenics heralds… However, as with all revolutionary thinking, there is somebody, somewhere experimenting with the foreign concept and pushing theories into popular systems of thought. These are the people that UK photographer, Murray Ballard has sought out and whose stories feature in Ballard’s first book published this year by GOST: The Prospect of Immortality.

Where Ettinger’s book of the same name introduces the significance of, the then unnamed, cryonics – Murray’s serves as more of an unofficial history, the collective memoirs and journals of those involved.

Nine years and three countries in the making, The Prospect of Immortality is a sizeable yet tightly edited tome of more than 80 photographs that bears the weight of it’s content; the stories of love, desperation, faith, comfort and despair of very mortal humans attempting to covet the ownership of the very last possession any person has. Murray’s work does not glorify cryogenics, nor does it attempt to quash the experimental nature of the processes involved. Ballard remains respectful and inquisitive without forcing any particular views, instead acting more as an interested archivist and allowing the stories to be understood dependent on each individual viewing, making more of an object for discussion instead of the altogether more common religious or scientific propaganda.

Reflecting the title, The Prospect of Immortality, although relentless in its scope and understanding, is not necessarily about the endeavors of Robert Ettinger, or even cryonics in a wider sense. Ballard’s work successfully describes the very human way a group of dedicated people come to terms with the ever-present and universal fear we all have to face.

Published by Gost, The Prospect of Immortality is available in our independent book shop for £35.

Written by Declan Connolly
www.declanconnolly.co.uk

If you’re a football fanatic, then you’ll love Girlfans by Jacqui McAssey and Alex Hurst.

Issue 1 is a limited edition zine dedicated to Liverpool FC’s female supporters. The issue shows the passion and diversity of LFC’s fans and the euphoria that comes from supporting a team you love.

Issue 2 celebrates the female fans of Everton F.C. The photographs are bursting with colour- Everton’s trademark blue inventively worn by the supporters of Goodison Park’s home team.

Open Eye Gallery is the only Liverpool stockist of Girlfans issue 1 & 2! Available for £5 each.

Find other self-published photobooks in our independent bookshop.

Supporting our current exhibition at Open Eye Gallery Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015 is a selected number of publications, which feature the work of the exhibiting artists – each described are available in our independent shop.

Upon entering through the front door of the gallery, metallic sheets of rigid steel greet the viewer. On the reverse of, and surrounding these floating shapes, are fixed fine prints portraying monochrome, angular poses that are both alien yet recognizable. This is the work of Joanna Piotrowska: a Polish photographer known also for the acclaimed ‘Frowst’ (£25).

Works from Frowst have been included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2013, and in the exhibition ‘Jerwood Encounters: Family Politics’, curated by Photoworks before being Published in 2014 by MACK. Frowst was awarded ‘First Book Award’ in the same year. The title of the book itself refers to this duality; an archaic word that describes a warm atmosphere that is equally stuffy and humid but can also used as a verb to describe to act of lounging in this area: comforting and uncomfortable.

Back at Open Eye Gallery, in Gallery Two, is the work of Tereza Zelenkova. There is a definite thread that can be woven between the two spaces with Zelenkova’s imagery also being monochromatic and somewhat obscure, however, we have moved from hard angles to an altogether more organic feel. Replacing cold, sharp steel is carved wooden frames and hung fabric.

Deliberately vague in meaning, Zelenkova uses these photographs to set the scene for the viewer’s own story, as she takes inspiration from the customs and folklore of her native Czech Republic. Looking at her earlier self-published work The Absence of Myth (£20) her path to decontextualized scenes becomes clear. From “Freud’s Study” to “Sea”, we are again given stories without characters, photographs interspersed with poems and short chapters, all eluding to the idea that without a human presence objects are left meaningless.

Upstairs, Open Eye Gallery’s third gallery is home to Matthew Finn’s photographic series Mother. Each intimate portrait gives the viewer a glimpse into the unique yet familiar relationship between mother and son, set against a backdrop evocative of Finn’s mother’s living room wallpaper. The sense that Mother’s story is unfinished brings optimism to an otherwise heavy-hearted journey away from independent living into a care home for the elderly.

Jerwood visual arts and Photoworks have produced an official catalogue (£4) for the touring exhibition: a view into the conversations between artists and their assigned mentors. The catalogue provides a closer look into the collective effort of writers, visual artists and mentors that has resulted in the collaborative exhibition currently at Open Eye Gallery until 18^th December 2016, and features beautifully printed work by all three artists.

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Written by Declan Connolly

Open Eye Gallery’s first Writer-in-Residence, Pauline Rowe, interviews exhibiting artist Tereza Zelenkova about her photography practice. You can see Tereza’s work on display at Open Eye Gallery as part of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015 from 28 October – 18 December 2016.

Pauline Rowe:  You have spoken previously of a dark romanticism in your work – can you say where this started in your imaginative life?  Was it something that came before your interest in photography?

Tereza Zelenkova: The romanticism… well I am a hopeless Romantic but in the reference to the movement. I actually just glanced at wikipedia and realised I am 200 years late with my work in terms of innovation!

“characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature. The [Romantic] movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It considered folk art and ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity.” 

And the darkness is probably inherent to this. To answer your question, it is not something that I set to do or intentionally mimic in my practice, it’s just always been a natural part of me and my photographs merely reflect that. I don’t know where it comes from, but it extends from the art, music and literature I like, to how I navigate in personal life as well.

PR: Can you say something about the important symbols in your work?  Carved stone, Christian imagery, trees, caves, streets, steps, locations related to folk-lore?

TZ: That’s quite broad question as there’s a lot to say about each of these. I think that a lot of these have something to do with rituals that people engage in and then how these relate to one’s surrounding landscape and nature.

PR: I’d like to ask you about Prague – it’s something you’ve described as “a city on the threshold of different worlds or realities” and also that ‘the city’s heartbeat has been heard loudest through the voices of its ethnic minorities.” Could you say a little more about that in relation to your work as an artist?

TZ: Yes, I’ve been thinking about Prague through the work of a German-Jewish writer, Gustav Meyrink who was influenced by many esoteric things. He was an occultist. Reading him is a bit like reading magic realism. He was interested in alchemy and he writes philosophically but also has a sense of humour. What I like about Prague is that it’s a city of mystery and astrology and astronomy with its narrow streets. It’s quite small with medieval parts. I think about Prague before the Jewish ghetto was demolished, before the second world war.  It has historic roots as the centre of Europe. It also has a strong German influence. Have you been there?

PR: I haven’t. No. You’ve talked about the German influence and also that it’s a city of mystery and metamorphosis in a way….what you do convey in your work is story – layers of story…? Could you say something about narrative and photography and your thinking behind that?

TZ: Yes, this is something I’ve been thinking of when I make my work. The stories behind the images are important. There is a Germanic influence in Prague from Rudolph II on. There’s always a struggle between what the image is able to say and what you get from the image without text. How much can you say and how much is actually lost. Sometimes, framing a fragment… Sometimes when I work it’s more like a diarist. I want to include the stories behind the images. I have a writer working with me and this introduces a different voice. My work allows for imagination and different interpretations.

PR:  You capture places which feel as though they are moving into the dark or towards darkness (e.g. Elizabeth Bathory’s Bedroom, Stairs) while leaving the viewer at the threshold uneasy and anxious.  Are you aiming to create this unease – if so, how does this link with images of the land – of your own country?

TZ: I quite enjoy the photography’s relationship with polarity of light and darkness. When you’re printing from a negative, the dark areas of the picture are formed by the light hitting the sensitive paper, so it’s actually the bright light that creates the darkest tones. It’s kind of similar like looking directly into the sun and getting blinded by that. For me that reflects on a lot of other things in the world and opposites that somehow complement each other or are actually the same thing. I can think of many cultural references that it embodies for me, for example like Arthur Rimbaud writing that you need to lay down into mud to see the stars, or alchemistic “as above so below”, and ultimately Georges Bataille writes a lot about darkness as excess of light. So that’s one angle of why I am attracted to the dark abyss within an image. The more obvious one is the sense of ambiguity of what lurks inside these dark openings and what might be looking back at you. (apropos “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”, Nietzsche). The image that I’d like to present is of a place that has its secrets, a place that can’t be overseen with a single glance and might be even fictional and one has to employ a bit of imagination to complete its image. I am looking for a sort of inner landscape rather than for the outward manifestation of it. The work is a lot about people’s relationship to the landscape of their home and how they create stories around it and so I am just trying to continue in that tradition by creating my own perspective.

PR: You’ve also said that each image has a meaning…some of the work you’ve done around landscape – it’s also as if you’re uncovering clues. 

TZ: It’s very common- sandstone – emblematic landscape of the Czech republic – and a lot of it. I didn’t realize how emblematic this thing was. I was not concentrating on the sandstone landscape although a lot of things I’d photographed had to do with sandstone. It is interesting to the people and it invites sculpture although it also erodes unlike marble. For the size of the territory it’s a small part of the Czech republic. It is interesting to see how people reacted with the landscape and their sensitivity to nature, working with it as opposed to destroying it – the symbiosis of people with the land. Together, the natural and human element – the opposite to globalization. It is not so long ago since that sensitivity was lost.

Sometimes I feel more like a diarist, to include the stories behind the images. I have a writer working with me (through the Jerwood-Photoworks award) so there is a sense of different voices and interpretations. I don’t want to work in a way that is too didactic or theory-based. Working with someone else allows for imagination and different interpretations. Sandstone is easy to carve into.

PR: You have written about Kopic, a man who carved symbols of Czechoslovakian nationality and history into the sandstone rocks behind his farm, the following:

“This man’s quest proves to me that art can be political but also therapeutic and a way of dealing with great injustice and that the most important examples of such art are often found not in contemporary galleries but in places where they’re least expected.”

What does this mean for work that is in galleries?

TZ: I don’t see my work as political although this is the most political work I have ever done. It seems a most reasonable way to resist globalization. The way people are moving and migrating. We are becoming scared of our own cultural heritage. How can we respond to this? It seems the most positive way is to examine your own roots and share them. The work is political because it’s about identity and legacy. How much influence does the place have where I grew up? It stays with you.

There are political artists always working with more spontaneous expression outside of the polished gallery world. It is most interesting to discover when someone did something for themselves. I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1985 and it was divided in 1993 but the split wasn’t a traumatic thing.

PR: You have said the working title is ‘the land with the secret heart beat’– can you say something more about this?

TZ: Again this is from Gustav Meyrink when he talks about Prague being “a city with a secret heartbeat” but the translation isn’t quite right and I couldn’t use the original language as it would be pretentious. What matters is the sense of what’s below the surface.

PR: You have written about wanting to photograph the death mask of Gustav Meyrink.  Will you do so?  Can you say why this is important to you?

TZ: I have actually photographed it few weeks ago. It was quite powerful experience to hold this in my hands and also to meet its current owners. Gustav Meyrink is a really important writer to me because he wrote stories that deal with esoteric and occult subjects, creating the upmost mysterious and poetic visions of cities and their inhabitants. His writings about Prague cause one too many people to look for places that exist only on the thresholds of reality.

PR: The sense of differing realities and ambiguity in your work is important.  Are you interested in how the viewer responds to this and could this response influence how you develop your work?

TZ: Of course I am interested how the viewer will react but I am not creating this work in terms of trying to reach specific audience. I don’t really think about my audience when making work, that’s not my motivation.

PR:  You have described the two influential themes that provoked the image The Unseen as the automatism of photography (linked with nineteenth century spiritualism) and the Czech fairy-tale Goldielocks.  In that tale the 12 princesses cover their hair when the prince is looking for Goldielocks amongst them.  In your image the family of women have their heads completely covered and the top of the covering is flat.  It suggests accusation, perhaps waiting death. Can you say more about this, especially as there are few human figures in this exhibition?

TZ: I think you are placing a lot of your interpretation on this image. Albeit it’s interesting one, it wasn’t my intention to produce the reading of accusation. The flatness is caused by the crowns worn by each princess and I really just liked the effect it produced. For me the image is more about a slightly surreal family gathering in pre-war rural setting suggesting some involvement with spiritism and ghosts.

PR:  Does your work have feminist aspirations and, if so, how?  

TZ: I think you have to be a feminist if you are a woman in today’s society. In my work I’ve been really interested in woman as a type of medium that connects the irrational and rational worlds or let’s say combines emotions and reason in very powerful way. I find it curious that a lot of spiritistic mediums were women as we somehow seem to be closer to the otherworldly side of being, perhaps we are much more intuitive and attentive to the invisible world. This is something I am trying to portray with some of my photographs of women.

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About Pauline Rowe, Writer-in-Residence
Pauline first got the chance to work with the Gallery through the LiNK programme at the University of Liverpool and continuing work is being supported by the universities’ Centre for New and International Writing. She has 2 poetry collections, also works as a poet delivering projects at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, and is currently doing a PHD at Liverpool University. Pauline lives with her husband and 6 children.

Open Eye Gallery’s first Writer-in-Residence, Pauline Rowe, interviews exhibiting artist Matthew Finn about his photography practice. You can see Matthew’s work on display at Open Eye Gallery as part of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015 from 28 October – 18 December 2016.

Pauline Rowe: To get started – I’m really interested in how the camera and photography has framed and supported your relationship with your Mum. Can you remember the moment this made sense to you (i.e. was there a starting point you consciously remember) – was it when you first received the camera?  And do you feel that the work is a joint (equal) collaboration with your Mum?  And would she agree with you?

Matthew Finn: I’d been giving a camera several months before I started photographing my mother. I remember well the first photograph I took, at least the first one I printed in B/W. She was sitting on a dining room table chair positioned close to the patio windows so she could get the fresh air from the outside whilst looking onto the garden. It winter 1986. The light was bright but soft and cast lovely shadows onto the wall behind my mother.

As I said I’d had the camera for a while before this picture. What started the project was moving from our council flat to the semi-detached home that all the photographs are taken. We moved in the spring of ‘86. I think that first photograph and the new surrounds were the springboard to the series and its continuation.

The idea of the collaboration is an interesting one. At first I was just practising, using my mother as a figure within the frame. Once I moved away to University, several years after the start, that’s when it became a series worth investing in. Also the images seemed fresh each time I visited as they offered a sense of time compared to the daily images taken before I moved away.

I was starting to look at Nan Goldin and Sally Mann and was struck at how different approaches could be taken to long term projects. I liked the idea of something that was tangible and accepting at the same time.

As time went on and I showed my mother the images she became aware of angles, her best side, quality of light, the closeness of the lens. I started to notice that she was coaxing me into the image she wanted. She knew how she wanted to be portrayed. This for me was a collaboration; it was unspoken we just continued with what I call a dance.

Photography became everything to us. I would not go back home without a camera and film and would be disappointed if the light was poor. I would have my camera ready first thing in the morning and photograph around my mother’s daily routine. We did this for 29 years in that house.

We never spoke about the project much. It was our routine. I had a camera and we made these images together. We needed each other. Would my mother agree on ideas of collaboration? I don’t know and now I never will.

PR: What is it that photographers can see that those of us who aren’t photographers miss? 

MF: I don’t know if photographers do see things differently. What you’re left with is a trace. Putting work in a gallery is to do with confidence and acceptance. There’s a hierarchy about having work in a gallery that social media can’t have. Photographers see very small things in detail of what they want to photograph. It’s the opposite, in fact of what you suggest. I want to see the same as everyone else so that the audience can recognise it. It depends on the type of work you make. I like to make work about everything around me – family, students – photos where people can find something of themselves.

PR: You mention (in the Jerwood/Phortoworks interview) that in the Winter of 86 the light was casting lovely shadows onto the wall behind your Mum. Is photography about your relationship with light – or how you see the light? 

MF: I love light and how light cast shadows. I’d never seen Van Gogh paintings before I saw them in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. There is a vividness of colour that I couldn’t replicate in life. It’s the same in Peter Greenaway films – with their sumptuous sets. Black and white made sense to me. Home for Mum was very brown – it didn’t lend itself to colour, but it did to light. Mum used to smoke – smoke is wonderful in light – and she used to drink – a crystal tumbler in the light is wonderful too. I don’t think I’ve changed from that constant in my work. To be good a photograph needs good light and a good subject. It’s only in war or when a singular event happens that you can’t aestheticise – then you can get away with no subject and poor light.

PR: You say your ‘Mother’ project started when you moved from your Council flat to the house where all the photos are taken. What was it about this move that was important to you and your Mum?

MF: It was a Council estate where you rented from the Council – it was rough and getting rougher. We lived in a top floor maisonette. To move to a house with a garden was amazing really. I was 16 and there was space to manoeuvre. I’d just left school. I hadn’t done particularly well, although I did enjoy school. The move came at a time when I was trying to figure out who I was. Photography worked on a lot of levels. It was instantaneous. The immediacy and the freedom. Slight independence. The camera exaggerated that independence and I enjoyed it. I couldn’t imagine not finding the camera. There are lots of things that made the work the way it is. The TV series Butterflies by Carla Lane – there was a lot in that series of a singular woman dreaming of a different life. I wanted to isolate Mother from the rest of the family. So we could have time together. The longevity of the project cuts through the question of how to avoid sentimentality. Here you see a person ageing.

PR: You talk about practising, using your mother in the frame. You were looking inside your house rather than outside – do you think this is unusual?

MF: Duration makes it unique. As a working-class boy there’s no way I could make certain types of work. Here you have a subject, you can keep on doing it and there are many of the same (Images). This is how we’d communicate. It’s ritualistic. This is what would be happening. It’s my point of view – as I lived in the house. We all had our own space. Lots of photos were taken from my mother’s routines and it’s how I had a conversation with her. It became important – part and parcel of our routine – taken for granted. My mother was a willing participant in this ‘dance’. In many ways she was directing me. I valued the time – it was over 30 years of her life – an incredible gift. I never questioned it or worried. Mum lived with her brother for 76 years and they had very defined roles in the home. He earned good money. There was a traditional division of labour. He provided Mum with security. Uncle paid for the house (£33,000 in 1986). He changed the destination. Mum couldn’t afford boxes of photographic paper. He was my father really. There was a confidence mother had. I wanted to portray mother as a heroine.

Once I moved away to University it became a project worth investing in…

PR: Is there a sense in which the photos are your life, not just evidence of it but how you see and understand – maybe remember your life? Do we find self-portraiture here?

MF: Photography is everything. I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. I look after my mother. There’s no escape. It’s so full on now in the last few years. If I start showing the work I don’t know if people like it. It’s public. I feel compelled to push it further. I want her to be recognised. Absolutely.

It is common. Dementia. There was not time to think about it. I was in Texas in 2014 and Uncle needed a pacemaker. But they didn’t operate in time and he was dead. 21^st May. This was a catalyst when her brother died. She has mixed dementia and he had been protecting her. She won’t stop moving. There are two images I’ve taken in the Home. We can’t collaborate now. Before, it was a photographic device to entrap my mother, and she could leave the house. Now she’s mentally trapped in her own mind and physically trapped in the Home. I’ve taken photos on my phone, soft images for me, but they don’t mean anything.

PR: How did the greater gaps of time help with the series?

MF: I don’t think it will be chronological. We are moving through time but not chronologically. It’s more a walk through the house to give a sense of change, time, taste, environment. A sense of semi-detached Englishness. Not in terms of the North – that’s just a back-drop. I never wanted it to be a kitchen sink drama. There are some clues, but very few. Maybe more of Uncle wearing a flat cap. But if I had put mother in the city – images in Leeds – that would have been very different. Everyone knows the punchline. The edit constantly changes. I don’t want it too obvious.

PR: Can you say more about how looking at Nan Goldin or Sally Mann’s work helped you to consider or think differently about your own work?

MF: I like the duration. Emmet Gowan’s work is an incredible series. Beautiful lyrical work of his wife Adrienne, showing the fragile nature of the skin. Photography shows you physical change. I liked the Seven Up TV series – there was a sense of a different life. An honesty and openness. The thing with this type of work is the inevitability about what will happen. Honesty.

I didn’t expect to be here 30 years later. The work will help. I photographed Uncle. How they occupied the space together. Mother will be a book. I’m working on that. Flexibility can change images on a wall but not in a book. Through the Jerwood-Photoworks award I’m working with a very good anthropologist, Elizabeth Edwards, who works like a detective and sees the work differently. She’s agreed to write the foreword for the book. I’m happy to collaborate.

PR: The way you describe your Mum as responding to angles and light – that she ‘knew how she wanted to be portrayed’ – gives a strength to her place in the work as collaborator rather than simple subject. Almost that she became more of an artist?

MF: Mum had no artistic ambition. That would have been so out of kilter, growing up in the second world war. It wasn’t a working-class option…It still isn’t. There’s a need for backing, which is why the Jerwood award helps. I have a burning desire to show my mother to the world. I suppose I need my uncle. He was my patron.

PR: I want to pick up on what you said earlier – about your photography of your Mum being like a ‘dance’?

MF: Yes there was a sense of movement – ‘too close”, “to the left,” ‘to the right,” – but it was not a power struggle. But an act of theatricality. It became so embedded in routine eg. cooking Sunday lunch, there was tremendous security. A lot of time the photos were punctuations. We needed to spend time in the living room. There was a rhythm, an instinct – something not happened for a while. Always thinking of an audience. It was 25 years before I showed anyone the work – Bridget Copeland from The Guardian and Dewi Lewis.

PR: You also said earlier “photography became everything to us” ?

MF: Everything I do is collaborative. I’ve been working with students for over 20 years. In some ways I prefer to work closer to an auteur (film theory)- but there are no commercial constraints, because I want to do a certain kind of work- to uncover peoples’ lives. You can do this in 20 pictures over 20 years. I only take photographs in places and backgrounds real to the person – with students it’s the college or their home. Now the reason for doing it is more for my mother – with the award and because of Jean’s (Mum’s) illness.

PR: Given how you work, what do you think of work in a studio?

MF: It is false. False emotion. You have to construct an emotion. The context is part of the whole. I wouldn’t want that backdrop to be denied or to be taken away. One exception I can think of is Richard Atherton’s photos of his Father which he took in his studio.   Also I haven’t been based in Leeds since 1989. I was only 3 years in the house, the rest of the work came from me visiting.

PR: What about technical stuff?

MF: All the work with Mum is on Leica Rangefinders. I do everything myself but I need a dark room now. Photography costs. Technology changes. You can’t teach technique any more given digital technology. For me what’s important is image, sequence and narrative.

PR: What does it mean to be a winner in the Jerwood-Photoworks Award? What did it help you to do that would have been difficult otherwise?

MF: My wife entered my photographs into the competition, not me. Martina sees the potential of the work and she wanted it to be recognised. It’s a finished body of work. I showed it sensitively. It’s inconceivable that young people now would make work like this. I had a range of ten projects on the go – all long term. I’ve been taking photographs of Prague since 1987. And my wife’s family. It only occurred to me recently that I took the first photo when my mother was 50. It’s only 5 years off for me – to reach the same age. How might I continue? – I might give my son a camera and see what he makes of it.

PR: In her essay “The Greys” Elinor Carucci says your works seems “curiously closer to the work of women artists than men..’ – what do you make of this?

MF: All my adult life it has impacted. I was always a quiet back-seat passenger. Mother would talk and talk and talk. Maybe photography was my way of getting into the conversation. Whether they are self-portraits or not – I suppose there is a reverse mirror image of me in the same moment in time. Physically there in each scene though I am not visible.

PR: Your work conveys change, time, fragility – is there anything you’d like to add?

MF: It all starts with the quality of light and then the every day things Mum would do. What mothers do for children. We see this in poor countries, mothers walking miles for water and hardship. When Mum worked she would get 2 buses and walk miles to drop me off at her sister’s before she took the same journey to work. She worked in a Jewish Textiles firm and later in a Bakery where she made cakes and sandwiches. It was important to document this labour – what mothers do. Regardless. A motherhood that’s not touchy, feely.

PR: Are there Catholic sensibilities at play in your work?

MF: I suppose there’s something of the quality of light, backlight. I love Easter and Christmas and there are certain values that are important. Trying to be a good person.

PR: Do you know how people receive the work? Does it matter?

MF: I like to talk to people where the exhibition is shown. The response in Bradford and Belfast was good. I suppose Liverpool sits the closest (in terms of the city). There’ll be 19 photographs in the exhibition and somewhere between 60-80 in the book from an edit of 400. It moves all the time. I have thousands of prints and 40 boxes of negatives. It needs an archivist.

—

About Pauline Rowe, Writer-in-Residence
Pauline first got the chance to work with the Gallery through the LiNK programme at the University of Liverpool and continuing work is being supported by the universities’ Centre for New and International Writing. She has 2 poetry collections, also works as a poet delivering projects at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, and is currently doing a PHD at Liverpool University. Pauline lives with her husband and 6 children.

With fewer daylight hours to play with, it’s the perfect time of year to embrace the night-time. Over the next few weeks we’ll be hosting a couple of events that suit the darker evenings perfectly; Ghosts in the Landscape, a writing workshop that draws inspiration from exhibiting artist, Tereza Zelenkova’s landscapes, taking place, very appropriately, this Halloween. Also on Bonfire Night, Light Painting, a chance to capture shapes drawn in the air using a torch, laser pen or other bright light, suitable for all the family.

Here are some highlights from our Independent Bookshop.

The Last Cosmology by Kikuji Kawada – £45
In the black night sky, the moon is a very obvious focal point. Always the same moon, but as Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada shows us in The Last Cosmology, somehow always different. Using various photographic techniques, Kawada presents us with an intriguing picture of the cosmos.

Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle the world by Marta Weiss – £25
Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her soft-focus portraits. While she endeavored to capture beauty, similar to the style of Pre-Raphaelite painters, using the medium of photography she managed to capture an otherworldly quality. This book is compiled from the V&A collection, and includes some of Cameron’s most iconic and haunting images.

In Case it Rains in Heaven by Kurt Tong – £25
Traditionally, in Chinese culture when a person dies it is up to the family to properly equip them for the afterlife, until their reincarnation. By burning joss paper folded into the shape of gold ingots, you are ensuring your late relative will have the money to live lavishly in the afterlife. As consumerism spreads across the globe, the essential luggage for heaven is becoming far more extensive. Kurt Tong takes a closer look at this phenomenon, collecting as many paper offerings as he could find, from iPods to umbrellas, to burn for his own ancestors… just in case it rains in heaven.

Liverpool has loads of cultural offerings kicking off tonight, here we break them down for you…

Open Eye Gallery, 6-8pm

Please join us for the launch of our latest exhibition, Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015. At 6pm, Tereza Zelenkova and Matthew Finn will be speaking about their projects on display at Open Eye Gallery.

The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are for artists using photography as a core part of their work. Supported by a group of mentors, the first award winners, Joanna Piotrowska, Tereza Zelenkova & Matthew Finn were given £5,000 to contribute towards creating new work.

Joanna Piotrowska’s work explores anxiety and the effects of global and political events on the individual. Tereza Zelenkova has travelled to her native Czech Republic to explore themes of history, local legend and folklore. Matthew Finn has been photographing his mother in a series of collaborative portraits since 1987.

The Bluecoat, 5:30pm-11pm

Adham Faramawy: Janus Collapse (the juice-box edition)
Janus Collapse (the juice-box edition) is a new solo show by Adham Faramawy exploring how identity is constructed in the 21st century.

Walker Art Gallery, 5pm-8pm

Benedict Drew: KAPUT
KAPUT, an Arts Council Collection acquisition, explores the concept of space tourism through a thrilling installation. Until 26 February 2017.

Looking North
An exhibition presenting work by artists from north-west England, highlighting many recent additions to the Arts Council Collection. Until 26 February 2017.

The Serving Library, 6:30pm

Keywords for Dummies: *Intellectual Property.*
“Keywords for Dummies” is a new series of talks presented by The Serving Library in an effort to saddle some commonly used terms that remain wildly misunderstood despite being highly circulated. They begin with Liverpool-based curator Darren Pih and Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico on the subject of Intellectual Property.

Culture Shifts is a new and exciting socially engaged photography programme, working with 10 national and international photographers embedded in communities across 7 areas of Liverpool City Region. It aims to support communities to explore their stories in a way that is meaningful to them.

“4 billion photographs per day are uploaded onto social media. Photography is now as important as text or verbal communication in the stories we tell about our own lives. Culture Shifts brings together people’s experience of the world and photographers’ expertise in taking and editing photo stories.”
– Sarah Fisher, Executive Director, Open Eye Gallery

Collaborating with photographers, communities will co-author a series of photo stories, reflecting on their identity, interests or lives. Collectively we hope these photo stories will inspire, surprise or challenge a wider audience through both a digital platform and 8 exhibitions across 7 venues.

The digital platform PhotoStories (currently being developed in partnership with Liverpool’s Red Ninja) will act as an online location for the photo stories created throughout Culture Shifts. In January 2017 the platform will be open for the wider public to share and respond to these new narratives, and also to upload their own photo stories.

As part of the overall Culture Shifts programme, Redeye, the Photography Network are working with local community champions and staff and volunteers associated with each residency to deliver training sessions on framing images, selecting and uploading photographs.

Liverpool based photographer Tadhg Devlin has been working in collaboration with the SURF Dementia network group, supported by Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. The SURF group act as support and advocacy network for those living with or affected by Dementia. This project will make it’s public debut as part of the new Tate Liverpool exchange programme in November 2016.

A number of young people’s groups from across Sefton, including an LGBT group and Youth Parliament group, are working with photographer Colin McPherson to explore the identity of young people in the area, reflecting on representation through online images. The Atkinson, Southport, will host the final selection of work in Spring 2017.

Birmingham based photographer Andrew Jackson, in collaboration with practitioner Darryl Georgiou are working with the people behind the public face of the “Granby Four Streets” community in the Toxteth area of Liverpool. Photo stories will be on display within one of the creative community centers in the area.

Communities in Northwood, Kirkby are coming together to work with photographer Tony Mallon to address what it means to live and be from the area. This is a welcome return home for Mallon, who grew up in the area. The results of this collaboration will be showcased at Kirkby Gallery in Autumn 2017.

St. Helens is home to the Pilkington Glass factory, which holds a key place in our industrial history. Photographer Stephen King and the local community connected to the factory will re-imagine and reanimate this site of industrial significance. The final photographic work will be displayed at the neighbouring World of Glass exhibition centre.

Working with photographers Gary Bratchford and Robert Parkinson, communities across Halton CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) will explore barriers to health and wellbeing, and how photography can challenge pre-existing ideas and fears to exploring this topic. Results of the project will be showcased at The Brindley, Runcorn, in Summer 2017.

London based photographer Maria Kapajeva will challenge perceptions of who exactly the women of Wirral are, and bring women from different backgrounds, ages and domestic circumstances together to celebrate what it means to be a woman from this area. The Williamson Gallery, Birkenhead, will play host to the final exhibition of works in Spring 2017.

A selection of all work created across Liverpool City Region will culminate in a Culture Shifts exhibition at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, in September 2017, which will also celebrate the partnerships across the City Region and the power of photography to creatively engage us all.

This programme has been supported by the Strategic Touring Programme, Arts Council England in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool CC, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, The Atkinson, Sefton BC, Granby4Streets Community Land Trust, Kirkby Art Gallery, Knowlsey BC, Heart of Glass, St. Helens BC, Halton BC, Halton CCG, The Brindley, The Williamson, Wirral BC, Red Ninja, Redeye, the Photography Network and LOOK: Liverpool International Photography Festival.

Find out more about each of the projects here:
openeye.org.uk/whatson-category/culture-shifts

Deadline: Midnight GMT, Wednesday 2 November 2016.

The second national Jerwood/Photoworks Awards seek outstanding proposals from UK-based artists and photographers using new approaches to photography in their practice.

Three Awards of £5,000 will be made to support the making of new work, alongside a mentoring programme, access to a significant additional production fund of up to £5,000 per artist, a group exhibition in London as part of the Jerwood Visual Arts programme at Jerwood Space (from January 2018) with a subsequent UK exhibition tour. Spectrum Photographic are the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards Official Print Partner.

Presented every two years, the Awards are open to all practitioners using photography and applicants must be resident in the UK. There is no age limitation and no requirement for art school or university education. Applicants will be expected to be within ten years of establishing their practice or graduating. Moving image work is not eligible for the Awards.

The selection panel will include: Celia Davies, Director, Photoworks; Sarah Williams, Head of Programme, Jerwood Visual Arts; Anna Fox, photographer; Ori Gersht, photographer; Mark Durden, writer and photographer.

The three selected artists will be announced in January 2017.

Both the Photoworks and Jerwood Visual Arts teams will offer curatorial and logistical support to the selected artists through 2017, plus a high-profile pool of mentors will support the selected artists for twelve months after selection. Confirmed Mentors in addition to the selection panel include: Rut Blees Luxemburg – photographer, Mitch Epstein – photographer, Fariba Farshad – curator, Francis Hodgson – writer/art adviser, Michael Mack – publisher, Maureen Paley – gallerist and Mark Power – photographer.

Information and details of how to apply can be found at photoworks.org.uk.

Open Eye Gallery is now closed to the public whilst we install our new exhibition:

Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015

Three artists were selected from a call for applications to UK based photography practitioners within ten years of establishing their practice. Each has received an award of £5,000 to support the making of new work for this exhibition, with a significant production fund and advice from a pool of thirteen Mentors including Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, Broomberg & Chanarin and Michael Mack as well as curatorial advice from both of the award giving organisations.

Matthew Finn has been photographing his mother in a series of collaborative portraits since 1987. Joanna Piotrowska’s work explores anxiety and the effects of global and political events on the individual. Tereza Zelenkova has travelled to her native Czech Republic to explore themes of history, local legend and folklore.

Exhibition Launch Night:
Thursday 27 October 2016, 6-8pm
At 6pm, Matthew Finn and Tereza Kelenkova will be speaking about their projects on display at Open Eye Gallery.

Exhibition Continues:
28 October – 18 December 2016

Check our social media platforms for regular updates #JPA2015
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2017 Open Eye Gallery will celebrate its 40th birthday. Over this period we have exhibited some of the worlds most inspiring and insightful photographers. We have championed the agency of photography as art, as social and historical document, and as integral to cultural impact of music, fashion, architecture and many other disciplines.

We want to celebrate your part in our history. It would be fantastic if you could share a memory with us.

John Stoddart – Photographer: “Open Eye Gallery, where I was given my first exhibition. They really took me under their wing to be honest. I was only 22 at the time and it encouraged me to do more” – 1981

Colin Wilkinson – Founder of Open Eye Gallery: “Open Eye Gallery, where I was dynamic. We were doing an exhibition a month. It wasn’t madness, it was exciting. Opportunities came up and we took them.” – 1978

Peter Hagerty – Previous Director of Open Eye Gallery: “Open Eye Gallery, where I found out that art can shock people. If you’re not provoking people into thought, what are you doing?” – 1980

Jog your memory by taking a look at our History page. Open Eye Gallery has previously been located on Whitechapel (1977-88), Bold Street (1989-1995) and Wood Street (1996-2010) before moving to Mann Island in 2011.

Share your memory with us by downloading this quote template or by emailing Dan Warner, Research Curator, dan@openeye.org.uk

Step back in time to the 1950s in this fascinating home and photographic studio.

“It is as though Hardman walked out one morning after a particularly hectic night in the dark room and forgot to come back”  – Dame Beryl Bainbridge

The award winning landscape and portrait photographer Edward Chambré Hardman [1898-1988] and his wife and business partner, Margaret, lived on Rodney Street for over 40 years from 1948. Famous artists such as Margot Fonteyn, Ivor Novello, Michael Redgrave, Patricia Routledge and Leonard Rossiter all sat for a portrait in their home.

The Hardmans’ House (59 Rodney Street, Liverpool) is the most complete collection of a photographer’s work and studio from the mid 20th century anywhere in the world that we know of, complete with all the vintage ephemera of their daily life.

Visitors to The Hardman’s House can book a fascinating tour and walk through the four floor Georgian town house and see their working studio, office and living quarters, kept intact as it was when they lived there. The house is jam packed with fascinating art, antiques and vintage treasure. A unique time capsule of Liverpool life and creativity.

The Hardman’s House collection is part of the National Trust Liverpool portfolio.

Opening Times:
March – October
Wednesday – Saturday
Tours start from 11am – 3:30pm

Price:
Adult £6.50 / Child £3.25 / Family £16.25
FREE for National Trust members

October offer:
Choose one of six FREE Edward Chambré Hardman prints with every tour booked at The Hardmans’ House until 29 October.
*One 10” x 8” print per person per tour. There are four prints to choose from including: The Copse, Museum Steps, Ivor Novello, Memories of Avignon, Shadow of the Aqueduct and The Arch Royal. Wwhile stocks last.

Booking information:
To book a visit call 0151 709 6261 or email thehardmanshouse@nationaltrust.org.uk

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardmans-house  /  @NTHardmanshouse

We need your help!

For our upcoming show next year North: Identity, Photography, Fashion, Lou Stoppard of SHOWstudio and Adam Murray of Preston is my Paris have selected photographs from our archive.

We are trying to reach photographers regarding images from the 80s and 90s which include; Paul Fazackerley, Martin Roberts, John Edwards, Dave Turner, Michael Robinson, Greg Leach and Rob Williams.

If you have any information, please let us know on exhibitions@openeye.org.uk

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. In this blog, Dan explores how John’s photography highlights how local children and adolescents made the most of a rapidly changing and decaying landscape.

—

Around the same time as John and Vanley began taking their photographs of the Piggeries, Roy Kerridge, a reporter for The Spectator, also happened upon the blocks during a visit to the city. In his account, the flats had become a symbol of the persistent religious tensions that still continued to partially define the landscape.

“The most famous of Liverpool’s dreadful flats are the Piggeries, which now stand empty and grey with dirt, nearly every window smashed. They look eerie in their solitude. However, I could not but admire the vandals in a way, for with courage over and above the call of vandalism, they had swarmed all over the outside of a block, high up in the air, and painted enormous slogans on the dizzying heights. Probably they had used ropes and mountaineering boots. ‘God Bless Our Pope’ I read, rather moved. Other, pro-IRA, slogans pleased less.

Once a front line in a district of Ulster immigrants and their grandchildren, the Piggeries look across to Everton Brow and Everton Road, Orange Protestant territory, where the slogans are ‘1690’, ‘Orange Order Rules’ and ‘Here to Stay, UDA’. In a daring raid, someone has even added a few IRA slogans here too.”[1]

Some of the graffiti of which Roy speaks can be seen from Vanley’s shot above. The area itself had been a hotbed of sectarianism during the early part of the twentieth century, and it was the embers and remains of this religious landscape, often continued through traditions such as Orange Lodge associations, that fascinated John. However, John found something more akin to a community club than a political or religious institution:

“I thought they were fantastic. Some of their nutty nights out were great. I remember speaking to one old lady, she wasn’t interested in anything religious at all, and she said they’d saved her life because she was cooped up in some dump in Everton Heights and they got her out and took her to these barmy social clubs with all the mad seventies music.”

Indeed, John’s photographs highlight the continuing centrality of the Orange Lodge as a community hub and not simply as an emblem of religious or political beliefs. His photographs of their “nutty nights out” highlight that for many of its members the religious connotations of the organisation were subsumed under the more mundane experience of everyday life. For John, these lively events were a test of his photography skills.

“You can see that they’re really rammed. I couldn’t say it was intentional because these rooms weren’t very well lit. I’d use the flash on the camera to make the shot quite brutal. Some of them almost look like paintings, a tableau of these people, there, just drinking. And there’d be one or two where someone will just be looking straight into the camera while everyone else was oblivious to what I was doing.”

In spite of the increasingly secular society in which it found itself, by the early 1980s the annual 12^th July parade was still a visible and vibrant street presence. Setting out from all areas of the city, the Lodge organisations would converge on the city centre and board trains to Southport. This image that John captured looks down London Road, with the corner of Saint George’s Hall just visible in the background.

“The marching season was a photographer’s dream. They certainly dressed up for it back then. There was always a little lad at the front with the baton or something. I used to love the marches, they really made an effort.”

For many, the spectacle provided an opportunity to have some fun. However, for some it was a day when religion and politics asserted themselves onto the local landscape. John remembered the days simmered with a tension just below the surface.

“But at the same time it wasn’t like, “Oh, lets just have a bit of fun.” Yeah, it was all marching and the crazy music and the banners, but underneath it all there was that little tension.”

Indeed, despite his positive experiences with the Lodge, John still felt unable to tell them of his own background.

“I’m a Catholic myself. I never told them that. That’s how weird it was. I had to take my Northern Ireland medal to show that I’d been in the army.”

A photograph that perhaps illustrates these underlying tensions is shown below. Previously unclassified in the archive, John immediately recognised this photograph as his own and managed to provide a detailed contextual picture. His description not only highlights the tensions that remained, but the continuing demarcations of the landscape across the boundaries of religion. Even at this late stage then, it appears that there remained areas that were Catholic and areas that were Protestant:

“That picture you’ve got of the lad being nicked by the police – there was always a little undercurrent of that. I don’t want to paint a picture of some little street urchins having good fun. He was caught throwing rocks at the Lodge. They deliberately marched through Catholic areas. It all sounds bloody stupid now, but it did get a bit tense.”

“There’s another picture I’ve taken, though I’m not sure if the Open Eye has got it, that’s quite surreal because there’s a lot of sky and there’s people hanging around. Some of them are dressed in the clothes of the Lodge. And you can see in their faces that something is going on. There were all these rocks coming over, and it was him throwing them. The police caught him pretty quickly.”

[1] R. Kerridge, ‘City of Dreadful Flats’, Spectator, 31^st January 1981, p. 13

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. In this blog, Dan explores how John’s photography highlights how local children and adolescents made the most of a rapidly changing and decaying landscape. 

—

A disappearing point of reference in the landscape of inner Liverpool at this time were the interwar tenements, and many shots in the archive deal with their increasingly dilapidated state. A good example of this can be found here, in a Stoddart picture of a boy and his dog taken outside Sir Thomas White Gardens, or “Tommy Whites”, situated by St Domingo Road.

Built much earlier than the post-war high-rises, strong communities had formed around these squares. However, by the early 1980s more and more of these tenements were earmarked for demolition and many communities began to gradually erode. A similar block was Gerard Gardens, seen in this shot taken by John McDonald in 1979. Paul grew up in Gerard Crescent, a tenement that ran down the spine of Gerard Gardens. His family moved there in 1960 and Paul had fond memories of his time there. After talking to work colleagues upon getting his first job in 1979, Paul remembers their alarm when he told them where he was from.

“They’d asked me so I said Gerard Gardens and they’d take a step back. They’d drive past and see the kids playing in the archway and think, “I’d hate to live there. Look at it, it looks horrible.” I can see how coming from an outsider’s perspective you’d be intimidated because when you walked through the archway you were surrounded on all sides. There wasn’t a lot of light that got through. But you speak to most of the people that lived there and it’s a different story. It was a great community and everyone looked out for each other. We didn’t have much, but because of that we made more of an effort to be social. There was no keeping up with the Jones’s because the Jones’s never lived there.”

When his mother was finally moved out before the blocks were pulled down in the late eighties and moved into a more conventional house, Paul described how much she missed her flat.

“The new house was lovely, it was a little two bedroom with a front and back garden. She hated it. She said, “You go in, you shut your door and you don’t see anyone.” Everyone got a little more insular, they got a bit more house-proud. The airs and graces as me ma used to say. There was none of that in the squares.”

Though difficult to imagine looking at this ghostly picture, the interwar gardens, which ironically had very little greenery, were the social hubs within lively and active communities.

“When we’d be in school or in work, me ma would just stand out on the landing. There’d always be someone walking along, and they’d stop and have a chat and they’d be there for up to an hour. That was the difference. When she had a front garden it became a barrier. People looked at the openness of the flats and thought it was a bad thing. But back then, it wasn’t. It was part of the community.”

Indeed, it was these open and communal spaces that formed the very heart of the community. And for the children growing up in these blocks, that was no different.

“We always used to play out. We didn’t have no space in the house. The landing was great for skateboarding because it was dead flat. Or we’d have games of football in the main square, and you’re talking about twenty a side here. No offside rules or nothing like that. What would happen was a game of footie would start as a four a side and then someone would run down and before you knew it everyone was there. There was a fella who used to live next-door but one to us, lovely fella, and he used to have a drink and that. He’d come in after being on the ale and we’d all be playing footie, and he’d be leaning on the landing shouting instructions out to the kids. “Pass it to him! Ger’ it out wide!””

Like many art graduates, I found landing a relevant job in the art sector really difficult – rather than signing on for benefits I took a job as a bartender and later at a theatre to make up more shifts. As the post-university blues set in, I began to feel culturally strangled – missing the creative circle I had on my university course, so, I quit my paid bar job and began volunteering at Open Eye Gallery In January 2016.

Instantly, the gallery provided the environment I had been craving and actively seeking for some months; I came to look forward to my weekly escape into the wonderful photography collection on the bookshelf, and on the walls of the gallery. I threw myself into what Open Eye had to offer – first, Front of House duties and then researching in the office with the fantastic permanent staff. The gallery team have been thoroughly supportive, asking me to write for the blog and capitalising on my (somewhat obsessive) camera and film knowledge – encouraging me to help with, and later, lead workshops. This is what the Open Eye Gallery family (yes, OEG really feels like family) does: members work out what makes you excited, what you are passionate about and builds it into tangible, workable skills.

Since volunteering, I have comfortably been able to lead tours of 20+ people through the gallery, asked to assist a Magnum photographer and even been put in charge of a paid month-long Biennial Fringe exhibition. In such a short period, I have seen my CV rocket upwards in terms of employability and have made an incredible group of friends from whom I learn something every week.

Thanks to Open Eye Gallery putting me in touch with the right people, I have been offered an internship at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong, I am moving to China in December!

I am unsure what I will be doing when, or if, I return from Hong Kong, but I know where one of my first stops will be.

Declan Connolly (Volunteer at Open Eye Gallery)

www.declanconnolly.co.uk

—

If you are interested in joining Open Eye Gallery’s team, check out our volunteering page for further information

In his talk at Open Eye Gallery at the end of July Michael James O’Brien, in a slightly altered version of Walker Evans, enjoined us to “Spy, eavesdrop, listen. Die knowing something.” It’s a phrase that came back to me hearing John Le Carré read his memoirs on the radio, as he commented on the closeness of spying and writing. I am learning to be a kind of spy in the world of photography, listening as hard as I can, trying to look at the world in a new way, trying to understand what it might be to write the world through light.

Our first event linked to my writing residency at The Open Eye was a Poetry and Protest workshop involving American ‘Occupy’ poet Juliana Spahr, radical poet Sean Bonney and poet Ruby Robinson who were sponsored by the University of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. (The Centre has also enabled me, as a PhD student, to work with the Open Eye as a writer.)

Poetry and Protest asked participants to engage and respond to Koki Tanaka’s Biennial exhibition which, inspired by Dave Sinclair’s original photographs, revisited the Liverpool school-childrens’ strike (1985).

Participants took about 30-40 minutes to have a good look around at the exhibition and talk to each other in the process. Some listened to the interviews, some also spent time considering the exhibition by Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. This includes work that documents the daily lives of three submersibles (Anti-Catty, Princess Rambo and Space-Sheep), works smuggled from Dubai to Liverpool.

Shared responses to the exhibition varied from the doubtful, to the curious to the questioning. What is the value of re-enactment? How do we have a voice? Who decides what was really happening? ‘How stylized the strike became when it became art.’

Juliana Spahr chose not to read from her own work but from African Dawn, the words of Keita Fodeba, the African poet and politician, killed in prison in the Republic of Guinea in 1965. Juliana shared her thoughts on how Fodeba developed a tradition of writing a good poem:

• It must define accurately the historic moment of the struggle
• Mark off the field – be clear about the terrain
• The poem must understand its history, recognize one’s advances and open up the past to the future.

Ruby Robinson, born in 1985 (the same year as the Childrens’ Strike’) talked about the idea of physical protest seeming radical to her, asking Am I a poet? Am I a radical? She also discussed what can happen when we’re “powered over” ~ one response is to comply with the wishes of the powerful, to protect ourselves. What does this do to our identity? Ruby’s interest in trauma is explored in her first collection Every Little Sound, from which she read her astonishing, long poem Apology.

Sean Bonney read work from his recent book, Letters Against the Firmament. He writes in rage against the forces of the establishment, and in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed.

We did more on that afternoon than I can share here but it felt unusual and challenging, sharing poetry and ideas with friends, students, arts professionals and practitioners, poets, mental health campaigners, other interested folk. I’m looking forward to the next time.

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Further reading:
Sean Bonney Letters Against the Firmament (Enitharmon Press, 2015)
For Sean’s blog: http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk
Ruby Robinson Every Little Sound (University of Liverpool Press, 2016)
Juliana Spahr That Winter the Wolf Came (ak press, Commune Editions, 2015)

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Written by Pauline Rowe, Writer in Residence

Liverpool Biennial 2016 is a story narrated through several episodes: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children, Monuments from the Future, Software and Flashback.

Open Eye Gallery’s exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2016 has a particular focus on the Flashback and Children’s episodes, featuring international artists Koki Tanaka, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.

The Flashback episode presents a way of experiencing history as it punctures the present, unexpectedly. The Children’s episode invites artists to consider children as the primary audience, making work with and for them.

To celebrate the start of Liverpool Biennial 2016 and the opening of the new exhibition, we have brought together products and publications from our independent book shop that reflect the Flashback and Children’s episodes, complementing the work of our exhibiting artists:

The Two- Sided Lake: Edited By Rosie Cooper, Sandeep Parmar, And Dominic Willsdon – £9.99

Published by Liverpool University press, The Two-Sided Lake is the essential companion to Liverpool Biennial 2016! Featuring scenarios, storyboards and sets from Liverpool Biennial 2016, the publication explores the concept of the ‘episode’ and how stories can be told. Includes contributions from Liverpool Biennial’s artists and texts by many more!

Precarious Practice: Koki Tanaka – £35.00

Koki Tanaka is one of our international exhibiting artists for Liverpool Biennial 2016. Tanaka revisited the scene of a 1985 protest in Liverpool, which involved around 10,000 school children angered by the Youth Training Scheme.

Precarious Practice was published by Deutsche Bank to coincide with Tanaka being awarded Artist of the Year 2015. His work often reflects on poignant historical moments such as America’s occupation of Japan and the 2011 tsunami in Fukushima, while participation from visitors adds a collective social element to his projects. The book explores Tanaka’s interest in the everyday, revisiting recent and past projects and how they came into fruition.   

YTS & Liverpool In The 1980s: Dave Sinclair (Café Royal Books) – £8.00 signed edition

Like the images on Koki Tanaka’s billboards? Dave Sinclair’s original photographs of the 1985 protest against the Conservative government’s Youth Training Scheme in Liverpool feature alongside Koki Tanaka’s video work in our Liverpool Biennial 2016 exhibition. These captivating photographs and many more feature in Liverpool in the 1980s and YTS. At the time, Sinclair was the official photographer for the Militant newspaper and consequently captured images of the anger and resentment of Liverpool’s children and the formidable impact social demonstrations can have. YTS is published by Café Royal Books an independent publishers based in North West England, specializing in documentary photography.

Are You Lost? – £6.00

Seven artists from the Royal College of Art exhibited in ‘Telling Tales’ a Fringe exhibition for Liverpool Biennial 2016 in collaboration with our curator Thomas Dukes over the opening weekend.

The Are You Lost? zine edited by Matt Taylor compiles the work of first year MA Photography students at the Royal College of Art, showcasing a diverse mix of talent and individual style. The images offer an insight into each photographer’s practice, from obscure landscapes to domestic interiors. 

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Our independent book shop is open Monday-Sunday, 10am-6pm throughout Liverpool Biennial 2016.

Written by Nicole Etherington 

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. In this blog, Dan explores how John’s photography highlights how local children and adolescents made the most of a rapidly changing and decaying landscape.

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Ominous and forebodingly present in many of John and Vanley’s shots are a collection of three identical blocks on Shaw Street. Crosbie, Canterbury and Haigh Heights in their original guise, though almost universally known as “the Piggeries”, were built in 1966. Each fifteen-storey block was promoted for the use of families and for many provided the first experience of indoor toilets and hot running water. Built from large, pre-cast concrete panels that were bolted together on site, the resulting design was hardly sensitive to the needs of its tenants and landscaping, decoration and architectural refinement was kept to a bare minimum. By the mid-1970s they had become so severely run down that tenants Mr and Mrs Irwin went on a rent strike that would eventually reach the House of Lords. Lord Denning, a judge who ruled on the case, could barely contain his shock upon visiting in 1977, just a few years before Vanley and John would take their photographs. His testimony chimes perfectly with their shots.

“At one time Everton was a slum. The houses were said to be unfit for human habitation. So the city council demolished them and built three tower blocks instead. But within 18 months the conditions there became so bad that, by all accounts, these tower blocks were not fit for human habitation.

First, the lifts were continually out of action. Either one or other of them, and sometimes both of them together. They are permanently vandalized, with buttons ripped off operating panels and lights smashed. They are regularly used as public conveniences. When the lifts are not working, people have to go up or down the staircase; but vandals constantly take out the electric light bulbs so that the staircase is very dark.

I myself travelled to the ninth floor by lift. Half an hour later no lift was operating and I had to return by staircase: throughout the whole of its length there was no light. It was still daylight outside, but down the stairs it was very dark. I heaved a very great sigh of relief when I finally did reach the ground level. How on earth a woman with two or three small children and possibly laden with shopping baskets could be expected to negotiate those stairs with any degree of peace of mind baffles me: and it is not to be forgotten that these premises are provided for the use, not of single persons or of married couples without children, but they are family houses.”[1]

Denning’s description is merely the tip of an iceberg. The rubbish chute was only 18 square inches wide, yet impressively one tenant had managed to get a mattress down there – an achievement that blocked the chute for everybody else in the meantime. Worst of all, the sewerage and sanitation system was severely faulty and the toilets regularly overflowed onto the surrounding floor or, if you were unlucky enough, into the flat below. This photograph, a Harry Ainscough print taken during the late 1960s provides something of a contrast. And its here, in these better times, that Canterbury Heights provided Eddie and his family with a childhood home between 1966 and 1968.

The vitality of Eddie’s memories contrast sharply with Vanley and John’s shots. Relocated to Huyton in 1964, the family jumped at the opportunity to move back into the old community.

“My dad wanted to be in amongst his mates. My mam went along with that; I think she was happy to move back because it was a long haul up to Huyton. Thinking about it now we should have stayed there but for some mad reason they took this flat in Canterbury Heights as an alternative to a three-bedroom house. Looking back now it was fun, but it was hard as well. You had to be tough to survive. The stairwell was full of shit and piss and you had to walk up and down it regular because the lifts never worked. It was alright for us kids; we’d have a laugh. But not for the ‘ald ones. It was a hovel. Looking back now I wonder how the hell we survived. But people lived in them. The community was great.”

This idea that the blocks were once a community was strong in Eddie’s memory.

“There was a big playground between Canterbury and Crosbie. On summer evenings the whole neighbourhood would be out. The kids would play there and all the mams and dads would be looking out over the balconies. They’d be watching the kids while chilling on the balcony. We’d have great fun.”

As well as the communal playground, the flats created new, more unorthodox, spaces of play for local children.

“The kids used to play on the landings and in the stairwells all the time. It was dangerous when you think about it. I was too busy studying for my Eleven-Plus but my younger brothers used to go up to the roof of the building through a lift shaft. Now, there’s a small ledge here and eternity on the other side. Me mam’s since said, “Christ! If I’d have known that at the time I would have collapsed!” It could have been so easy. The kids would do mad things like walk across the little ledge. There were some dangerous kids there.”

Eddie’s memories of these games of brinksmanship perhaps illustrate why Lord Denning would deem the blocks as totally unsuitable for families.

[1] Lord Denning, [1977] AC 239

I have many lives not just two. Roleplay is changing one’s character to assume a role: it can be realistic for training purposes; for example one character plays an awkward customer. The internet gave rise to new, freeform text-based roleplays and the subsequent advent of virtual worlds has given rise to a new genre of personal actors immersed as avatars in the virtual world where paragraph after paragraph they create fictional narrative drama with each other over hours, days, months and sometimes years.

Bleed describes the remarkable gestalt where the character actor and the out of character typist ‘bleed’ into one another. There is a similar effect when reading a novel or watching a film experienced as the empathy you have for the characters and following from this is the memory of the experience, the film becomes a part of you, a book becomes a part of you, just as much as last years holiday is a part of you.

The actor George Costigan once said “you can’t play yourself, it’s too fluffy” and we know from the drama of theatre and the narratives of the novel that dull people make for dull stories so the citizen paragraph role players living in Nadir Taov’s ‘Dead End’ explore twenty-first century themes reminiscent at times of ancient Euripides.

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www.arklo.com

Zanele Muholi is a South African photographer and visual activist whose work explores gender, race and sexuality, particularly in relation to South African society and political landscape. In 2015 Zanele Muholi presented VUKANI/RISE at Open Eye Gallery, the first major presentation of her work in the UK. One of the three series on display for this exhibition was Faces and Phases (2006–16), a living and growing collection of portraits making visible black lesbians and transgender men in South Africa. A decade since the project began, STEVENSON celebrate the 10^th anniversary of Faces and Phases.

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STEVENSON is proud to present Faces and Phases 10, a special project by Zanele Muholi celebrating the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed portrait series documenting black lesbian and transgender individuals from South Africa and beyond.

Muholi’s 10-year celebration takes place just days after South Africa marks another milestone: a decade since the Civil Union Act was introduced in the National Assembly on 12 September 2006. The act, which was passed on 14 November 2006, legalised same-sex marriages and civil partnerships.

As an emerging artist at that time, Muholi was painfully aware of the lack of documentation of her community, and its absence from visual history, and this drove her to embark on her series of black and white portraits. Since taking her first image of Busi Sigasa at Constitution Hill, Muholi has captured more than 250 portraits, and is now producing follow-up images of her participants as they go through various phases in their lives.

‘The journey has been long and hard,’ says Muholi, paying tribute to the bravery of her participants, who she describes as ‘history makers who are positioned differently in politics, economy and in society’. Some of those featured in this exhibition were members of the Chosen FEW soccer team that Muholi accompanied to the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago.

Muholi notes that Faces and Phases’ 10th anniversary also coincides with 60 years since the historic Women’s March of 1956. ‘We are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those women who marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to challenge an unjust system. Were there lesbian women among that crowd? What narrative would they share with us today?’ she asks.

An archive of this magnitude is not built overnight, and Muholi admits that working on the series has been emotionally and physically exhausting. It has also brought her joy and fulfilment. For her, a highlight ‘is when participants meet in different places and spaces, when we travel together locally and abroad. I get excited when I see people presenting in different events and when we come together to share skills like during the Yithi Laba youth conference last year.’ Muholi has been able to witness the progress that has taken place in participants’ lives, as well as the emergence of new photographers through training workshops.

Setting out 10 years ago, Muholi described Faces and Phases as follows:

‘Faces’ express the person, and ‘Phases’ signify the transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression and experience to another. ‘Faces’ is also about the face-to-face confrontation between myself as the photographer/activist and the many lesbians, women and trans(wo)men I have interacted with from different places … Faces and Phases is an insider’s perspective that both commemorates and celebrates the lives of the black queers I have met in my journeys. Some of their stories gave me sleepless nights as I tried to process the struggles that were told to me. Many of the women I met had been violated and I endeavoured not to exploit them further through my work. I set out to establish relationships with them based on a mutual understanding of what it means to be female, lesbian and black today. Faces and Phases is about our histories and the struggles that we continue to face. 

These words continue to hold true. By showing some of Muholi’s initial portraits alongside others taken more recently, this celebratory exhibition will map the trajectory of each individual’s growth. Muholi will also introduce the audience to new participants, highlighting the fact that this is a living archive. Reflecting on the past decade, the award-winning Muholi states: ‘Faces and Phases is the only project in Africa of its kind. It is a success, milestone and record-breaker.’

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Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 10 will be on display at STEVENSON, Johanesburg, from 15 September – 14 October 2016

www.stevenson.info

twitter.com/facesandphases

Youthful Spaces

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. In this blog, Dan explores how John’s photography highlights how local children and adolescents made the most of a rapidly changing and decaying landscape.

—

“Can you imagine walking around taking pictures of kids now? You’d be lynched. I used to get invited into their house and they’d jump around and pull out their knives and air guns, their pigeons and get their dogs outs. They just loved being photographed. And then I’d meet their mum and dad and they’d be like, “Oh, that’s a good idea! Anyway, come on, in for your tea now.” It was completely innocent. It was a different time.” – John Stoddart

That John’s photographs are laced with humanity and individuality seldom present in historical representations of these areas at this time is evident. No clearer does this appear than in the many shots of children amongst the decaying landscape.

For John, these photographs excavate a contradictory mixture of emotions and memories. On the surface they beam with an energetic happiness, but bubbling just underneath there remains a tinge of sadness.

“I’m going on gut reaction here but I just remember them all to be really vibrant, happy kids playing on the streets. I love this one, though I find it quite moving actually. They were brother and sister and she’s holding his hand. You can’t really tell from the print but she was wearing a pink leather dress and he’s got a little bobbly hat on. If you look closely at the photo he looks cold. I remember him being really cold. God knows how she was wearing only that little dress. And you can just see this bloody hovel they had to live in. Despite all that, they seemed really happy.”

While the streets around them fell apart, it appears that children saw only opportunities. The increasingly derelict landscape became the setting for an adventure. Abandoned and deemed useless by the adult world, children reimagined these landscapes as their own territory. In this photograph, taken by John in 1985, a group of friends and a small child tucked away in the middle of the group have adopted an abandoned caravan for play. Pauline, a local mother at the time, remembers childhood acts like this to be a common occurrence.

“My son got up to everything. There’d be an old wrecked car there with kids jumping and playing on it. People used to dump stuff on the wasteland, fly-tipping and stolen cars, but the kids made it into their own little wrecking area. They’d sit inside it and pretend to race. You’d think twice now but years ago they had fun with it. They didn’t see it as a threat. And neither did the neighbours, really. Normally we’d say, “Oh leave them playing in it, they’re doing no harm.” Growing up in the area was good. You felt that your kids were safe.”

On this topic, Pauline remembered one incident in particular involving wrecked and dumped cars:

“There was one car that I can remember in particular. It was an old wreck and the kids were taking pieces off it, taking the seats out, “We’re fixing it, we’re repairing it!” They didn’t see it as a danger, instead they used to say, “Well come on, lets put the headlamps back on it. Let’s put this back together.”

The children’s sense of ownership over these areas is clearly demonstrated when Pauline remembers the their reactions when the council came to take the car away:

“Actually, when the police and the council moved that car all the kids were going mad. “Ahh, no! They’re taking our car!” They thought it was theirs to play with!” 

In very few of John’s photographs of local children are adults actually present. Crucially, it seems that this was often a playground bereft of parental or communal observation. Without the surveillance their parents experienced growing up in terraced streets, John’s photographs demonstrate how some children and adolescents used this landscape to their advantage by actively seeking out the nooks and crannies of the failed or failing housing developments. Of course, with the lack of surveillance came the opportunity for mischief.

John remembered this shot particularly well, though there’s much about it that remains tantalizingly unexplained:

“God knows how he got that black eye. He’s got a little bar sticking out between his legs and he looks a bit shy about me taking his picture. He was using that pole to try and get into the disused shop behind him with the corrugated blind down. Yeah, it’s just his little face and you wonder who belted him to give him a big black eye like that. There’s a lot of mystery behind that one.” 

Perhaps this point about surveillance is most strikingly illustrated by this photograph of the Radcliffe Estate. A peripheral blur dwarfed by the scale of what’s behind him, this child seems almost perfectly camouflaged against his background. Built in the mid-seventies and demolished less than twenty years after completion, the Radcliffe was jammed between Shaw Street and Everton Road and designed to look like a quaint Cornish fishing village. Its confusing and unusual design became difficult to maintain and the estate was quickly sent into a spiral of decline. Bin lorries, emergency services and even its tenants’ cars struggled to penetrate into this labyrinth.

Proverbially, the same apparently applied to police officers. Instead of becoming a cosy and homely neighbourhood, its maze of dark passages and complicated walkways became locally notorious as a quick and easy escape route. In this context, the fleeting presence of a child running past the estate brings new mysteries. Where he was he running to? Or, perhaps more importantly, what was he running from?

Photographer Simon Bray talks about his new project in collaboration with painter Tom Musgrove.

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The Edges Of These Isles, a project born from a desire to collaborate. What could a photographer and a painter learn from each other by exploring the British Isles together?

There were no aims, or targets, we didn’t try and predict or restrict the work that we could make from each of the seven locations, and by no means were we looking to represent the British Isles, we just had a desire to create landscape work and gave each other the excuse to do so.

Spread over 2 years, starting out at Buttermere in the Lake District, and over time, travelling to Lindisfarne, The Brecon Beacons, The Gower Peninsula, Glen Coe, The Causeway Coast and The Peak District, we spent a day or so in each location, with myself documenting as a photographer, and Tom gathering sketches and building a sense of a place to translate into a final piece in his studio back in Manchester. Through our long journeys, time spent talking together on location, walking, eating, meeting up to review past trips, share work and plan future trips, we begun to learn from one another. We were both representing the same place, at the same time, in the same season, weather, having been on the same journey, but the work would look vastly different. Each piece a unique perspective of our personal experience of that place at that time, so we begun to question each other’s practice and process.

As a photographer, my processing happens in the moment. Of course it is influenced from years of image making, study and looking at images, but I have to make practical and creative decisions in that space to create and represent the landscape. Tom’s process is vastly difference. His ability to gain a sensory understanding of a place has truly inspired me. His pace is slow, he’s looking for a colour, gesture, shape, weather formation, a smell or sound, or a combination of them all to build in his mind an understanding of what each place is, and how he is experiencing it through his unique lens. That ability to experience in the present and allow that to inform the work he creates really is the essence of what I will take away from this collaboration, and certainly something that I am working hard to instil into my own creative practice.

We have each created one piece from each location, to be exhibited in a gallery setting at The Whitworth in Manchester for one night only. Alongside the exhibit, we have produced a book, featuring the final pieces, as well as further work, sketches, ideas, personal accounts, maps and more, which will be launched on the night, as well as the premiere screening of a documentary about the project and a Q&A with Tom & I where we’ll try to give further insight into the project. You are very welcome to attend!

We are extremely grateful to Arts Council England, G.F Smith, DoodledoMOTION, Pressision Printing, Fred Aldous and Thornbridge Brewery for supporting this project.

The Whitworth, Manchester – 8th September – 6-9pm Exhibit / Book Launch / Documentary Screening / Q&A with Simon, Tom and John Moores nominated landscape artist, Richard Webb

Facebook Event: www.facebook.com/events/494737284070700

www.theedgesoftheseisles.com
www.instagram.com/theedgesoftheseisles

Start your Liverpool Biennial 2016 journey by exploring the exhibitions and public artworks on display at the Liverpool Waterfront. If you are coming into Liverpool via train depart at Liverpool James Street, or ask for Paradise Street is you prefer to use the bus.

Instead of a theme, the Biennial is using the concept of ‘episodes’ to bring together a wide range of artworks. This year, the contemporary art festival is a TV show. In line with this, the artists and artworks can be regarded as characters that you spot in different venues and become more familiar with as you explore the Biennial. I find myself drawn to elements of the time travel episode in a lot of the artworks on display at the Waterfront venues and public spaces.

One artwork that you will definitely become familiar with is ‘What the Living Do’ by Jason Dodge. It is a series of scattered rubbish placed around the Biennial venues, signifying the passing of time and mob mentality through its invitation of asking Biennial goers to add to the accumulating bits on the floor.

From the train station, walk straight down the hill to George’s Dock Ventilation Tower Plaza. Here you will find Betty Woodman’s ‘A Visit to Rome’ which is a fountain made up of a concrete structure with delicate bronze details spread across it. Woodman’s source of inspiration for this jump across different times, borrowing styles from Ancient Greece to Italian Baroque and Picasso amongst many others to create a final display of ancient like treasures.

A protest is happening nearby at Open Eye Gallery. Fear not, this is actually an artwork by Koki Tanaka and is a re-stage of the mass protest against the Conservative Goverment’s Youth Training Scheme that happened in Liverpool just over 30 years ago in 1985. History repeats itself and although this protest is staged, its content is very relevant to the challenges of gaining higher education and securing real jobs that many young people are facing today.

After Open Eye Gallery, walk behind the Museum of Liverpool to make your way to Tate Liverpool. It’s hard to miss but keep an eye out for the Dazzle Ship when you’re walking next to the river. Inspired by war ships from World War II, Peter Blake designed the bright geometric patterns for this Mersey ferry that parade colours across the grey river.

We travel further back in time at Tate Liverpool. Although there are a number of contemporary artworks dotted around the exhibition space, the main highlight here is the Henry Blundell’s collection of mismatched classical sculptures. There’s something unnatural about these sculptures, some more obvious that others and that’s because 18th century restorers had a humorous practise of repairing these objects for sales by using random fragments to create a complete but entirely new work.

When you’re ready to leave the time travel bubble on the Liverpool Waterfront, you can head over to Paradise Street to get the 27 bus to Cains Brewery and 143 Granby or walk into town to explore the Bloomberg Contemporaries at the Bluecoat and the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery.

Written by Sufea Mohamad Noor
www.sumonospectrum.tumblr.com
twitter.com/sufeamono
instagram.com/sufeamono

About Liverpool Biennial
Liverpool Biennial presents the largest festival of contemporary visual art in the UK. It takes place every two years across the city in public spaces, unused buildings, galleries and online. Liverpool Biennial 2016 runs from 9 July until 16 October and is organised as a story narrated in several episodes: fictional worlds that draw from Liverpool’s past, present and future. Founded in 1998, Liverpool Biennial has commissioned over 268 new artworks and presented work by over 400 artists from around the world.
www.biennial.com   /   #Biennial2016

Field Editions works with photographers to produce benefit limited edition photographic prints in support of Northern photography. www.fieldeditions.org

Established by Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Redeye, the Photography Network, Manchester, and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Field Editions presents its inaugural portfolio of 20 exceptional – yet affordable – limited edition prints by both established and emerging contemporary photographers. All sales proceeds go towards supporting the three organisations in this consortium and the work they do investing in the next generation of photography talent.

Limited edition works kindly gifted by photographers to Open Eye Gallery include prints from John Stezaker, Eva Stenram, Paul Morrison, Jordan Baseman, Andrew Cross, Jamie Lau and Leo Fitzmaurice. Further editions are available from artists such as Rut Blees Luxemburg, Karen Knorr, Murray Ballard and Martin Parr.

All editions can be viewed and purchased online through the Field Editions website. The prints will also be available at the Field Editions stand at Manchester Contemporary Art Fair, 22nd – 25th September 2016 and in NADA Miami in Nov 2016.

Supported by Arts Council England.

www.fieldeditions.org

www.instagram.com/fieldeditions

www.facebook.com/fieldeditions

Changing the Picture: Using photography to rethink our approaches to inner city life

Dan Warner is a 3rd year PhD Researcher and Teacher at the University of Liverpool. Having completed a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Cultural History, his thesis utilises social documentary photography to explore working class culture in British inner cities during the 1970s. Dan completed a placement at Open Eye Gallery in 2015, composing and delivering the Spoken Words and Photographs event during which images from the Gallery’s archive were matched with local oral histories. In the following series of blogs, Dan explores the research conducted, including representations of life in British inner cities at the time and the uses of urban street photography as an historical source. This first blog explores the idea behind using photography like John Stoddart’s to revaluate how we remember and visualise the inner city at this time.

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“I was just taking pictures of where I lived, basically. There was no political motive in any of the photographs. I just loved photography.” – John Stoddart

John Stoddart hasn’t always been a celebrity and glamour photographer. For a period of four years in his twenties John would take a series of photographs that represent a detailed and evocative document of Liverpool at the time. Whilst talking to me about what he remembers about this time in his life, John is keen to keen to stress the personal motives driving him. However, whether intended or not, John was pointing his camera at a community during a moment of extreme transition. Situated in a very particular time and embedded in a very particular place, the inadvertent social and historical significance of these photographs is clear.

“Ironically, when you look at them they are, by their very definition, political. You’ve only got to look at some of the housing conditions in those pictures. Some of those people had to live in bloody slums.”

The setting of John’s photographs – Vauxhall and Everton – provides us with a rich topic to explore further.

Council housing, high-rise flats, tenements, estates, the inner city. A collection of seemingly neutral nouns that instead conjures an array of strong images and a rich inference of not always positive meanings. Hotly contested elements of post-war political and social policy, intricately tied into the moods and fortunes of the nation, many of the terms have now become stigmatised beyond reasonable debate – reduced to a series of “no-go” areas endlessly parodied and stereotyped in popular culture and the national psyche.

From the mid-1950s onwards, British cities were buffeted by a series of material, social and economic changes. Under the optimistic spirit of modernity, city centres and inner cities were comprehensively redeveloped. The cramped, out-dated and in many cases squalid rows of terraces were razed in the name of progress and replaced with bold and confident high-rise blocks and modernist estates, symbolic of the new metropolitan lifestyles that urban modernity would foster. The bullish mood of the day is apparent in the Liverpool Echo, here commenting on a 1958 exhibition entitled Liverpool of the Future.

“The exhibition will be of particular interest to the residents of Liverpool’s 375 darkest acres, those 39,000…living in the forest of 90 to 130-years-old terraces…in Netherfield, Vauxhall, St. Domingo and Westminster…they will see what the future holds for the dreary, narrow streets and blackened houses which have been their familiars for too long.”

However, as the seventies ushered in economic crisis, recession and a breakdown in the post-war consensus, British inner cities began to erode into disrepair. In seeking to understand precisely what had gone wrong, a very particular aftermath narrative was constructed. It is one that guides our opinions, imagery and policy-making to this day. A tale of strong and cohesive terraced communities smashed by overzealous planners and politicians who deemed them slums, fit only for the bulldozer. A myriad of social, political and economic changes was downplayed in a rush to scapegoat the design faults of the planners and architects, the possible corruption of local politicians and, perhaps most unfairly, the very nature of inner city residents. On a much more basic level, this narrative simply ignores the everyday practices and experiences of working class life that continued regardless of the instability of the landscape around them.

As an historian, herein lies the challenge. Piecing together the everyday activities, the ordinary lives and the memories in the face of such an overpowering and unhelpful stigma. The Open Eye Gallery’s archive has proven a useful tool in this challenge, helping to reconstruct the lives and experiences of those who lived through these changes.

“So what I used to do was, almost every day, I’d literally just walk the streets of Liverpool with a pair of cameras and I started taking pictures, finishing up around ’84. I was doing a part-time job in the Post Office. I’d started at six in the morning, I clocked out at one and I became a photographer for the afternoon. I didn’t look into the things that were happening. It was laid out on a plate for you, really. It was in-your-face street photography, a great piece of street theatre happening every day. I printed all the pictures myself and I approached the Open Eye Gallery.”

What has been left behind from this is a wonderful archive of inner city Liverpool in the early 1980s. The photographs form a curious mixture of urban blight, poverty and hardship, but also of a strong community spirit and stoical attitude, all overlain with a tender and moving sense of humanity. In the following series of blogs, I join these photographs alongside the personal testimony of John, local residents and commentary from the time to present the histories of everyday life so often ignored amidst the narrative of overwhelming decline. Forming a counterpoint to endless statistics of population losses, factory closures and reports of poverty and dereliction, John’s photographs show a vibrant landscape, inhabited. Perhaps then, these photographs stress not so much the failure of town planning or the British economy per se, but a much less well covered issue – the coping mechanisms and ordinary everyday life that continued in spite of everything.

Fee. Fixed fee £15,000 (approx.£29,000 pro rata) 

Project length: September 2016 – June 2017 (9 months)

Time Commitment: Part time leading to full time during Festival delivery.

This job description is not intended to be exhaustive. The post-holder will be expected to adopt a flexible approach to the duties which may have to be undertaken subject to the needs of the Festival.

Application process & schedule

Please send a CV and cover letter highlighting your ability and experience to meet the requirements of the job description and person specification for the position of Festival Coordinator to:

Lawrence George Giles, LOOK Chair of the Board, l.g.giles@salford.ac.uk

The deadline for applications is 5pm, Friday 2^nd September. Interviews will be conducted on Monday 12^th September at the Open Eye Gallery with the role commencing as soon as possible.

LOOK presents Liverpool’s International Photography Biennial; a four-week festival with a programme of exhibitions, talks, tours, workshops, participation activities and screenings. The LOOK festival features work by emerging and established artists from Liverpool, the UK and beyond. It combines historical exhibitions with contemporary solo and group shows. The majority of work on display is new or being shown in the UK for the first time.

LOOK has already delivered four successful editions of the festival, in 2007, 2011, 2013 and 2015, and is now established as one of the leading photography festivals in the UK. To build on from these accomplishments the LOOK Board is seeking an entrepreneurial and energetic individual to oversee and coordinate the delivery of the 2017 festival and support photographic practice in Liverpool and the wider North West.

Overview of role

Based at The Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, the Festival Coordinator will work closely with the Festival Curator and Chair of the Board of Directors to deliver the Liverpool International Photography Festival. You will also be the main point of contact for Fringe artists/venues and be responsible for managing festival volunteers.

You will need to have excellent verbal and written communication skills and able to oversee LOOK’s social media and online presence throughout the Festival.

The Festival Coordinator will report to the Festival Curator and Chair and will play a crucial role in the day to day running of the festival ensuring the smooth delivery of the festivals events.

You will be responsible for the successful co-ordination of the festival programme, ensuing logistics and requirements are managed effectively and that all events run to budget and to deadline.

Job Description

Management

• To work closely with the Festival Curator and oversee all Festival participants and artists including detailed negotiation of all requirements and technical specifications.
• To oversee the content of the Festival website and social media platforms in the lead up to and during the festival.
• To oversee and manage a pool of volunteers to deliver the LOOK/17 festival.
• To manage relationships between the festival’s partners and stakeholders in order to ensure a co-ordinated strategy for the delivery of LOOK activities.

Administration

• To maintain organisational budget and complete financial reporting to Board and funders as required
• To oversee evaluation processes of the festival, including data collection analysis, reporting and development of legacy materials
• To maintain and expand a database of professional contacts for LOOK
• To report to the Festival Board at regularly scheduled meetings, providing update reports and information about strategic goals.
• To meet fortnightly (approximately) with the Chair to provide updates and development

Development

• To maintain effective communication with current stakeholders and the Board
• To identify new contacts in business and the community with the aim of establishing new partnerships and opportunities for collaboration
• To undertake a detailed post-festival evaluation, with recommendations for future Festivals

Download Job Description

Download Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form

Hello again from Rose Howey!

We write this off the back our first event ‘July 1, 2, 3…”; an introduction to the artists showing in The Event Room this summer. Although first and foremost a successful exhibition of politically charged, personally expressive artwork, the show also radically improved our main communal space and celebrated the coming together of friends and residents of Rose Howey cooperative. The exhibition sought to socially and artistically gather the residents of the cooperative and unite our local community whilst making us all aware of the importance of communal spaces.

Even the youngest dwellers got caught up in the artistic dynamic, embracing the moment and spontaneously producing artwork which was displayed in the corridor, creating a ‘fringe’ show of their own!

The exhibition was a great opportunity to introduce housing cooperation to an audience that may never have experienced or been aware of it before. Simultaneously, it was a chance to bring artwork to a public that may frequent cooperative spaces but not necessarily art galleries. It is these interactions that activate the space as an artwork itself and therefore blur the boundaries between private and public space by creating a community space – redefining what is “dwelling”. This can be understood in the light of Heidegger’s conception of dwelling; his philosophy argues that building, dwelling and thinking are actually one unique intellectual operation and that language throughout History has divided into different concepts, (Originally published as in Martin Heidegger’s ‘Building and Dwelling’, [Bauen und Wohnen].

The next exhibition to come to Rose Howey Cooperative Gallery will be ‘Chernobyl: 30 Years On’, which takes place at the end of this month. It will be the first exhibition of new works by 26:86 Collective, a group of artists of varying practices based in the North of England. The show features artistic output following their expedition to Chernobyl and Pripyat in Ukraine which investigates the site on the 30^th anniversary of the biggest and most devastating nuclear disaster of the 20^th century.

This weekend it is the turn of the MaMa group (Migrant Artist Mutual Aid), to leave The Event Room, their rehearsal space, and perform in the Atrium of the Open Eye Gallery. The cross-national, multi-lingual, multi-faith group of women will be singing a love song in Swahili, a lullaby in Xhosa, a Civil Rights song in English and of course a Bollywood song celebrating racial equality.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Open Eye Gallery appoints new Writer in Residence: Pauline Rowe

Open Eye Gallery is delighted to appoint Liverpool based poet Pauline Rowe as our first Writer in Residence. Over the next five months Pauline will be leading a programme of creative writing interventions and workshops, inviting writers to respond to our programme, develop new writing and explore opportunities to work with photographers.

Open Eye Gallery’s Executive Director, Sarah Fisher said:
“Photography has an easy affinity with the written word, poetry, new and experimental writing, and Open Eye Gallery is delighted to welcome Pauline Rowe as our first Writer in Residence. Pauline shares the Gallery’s collaborative ethos and interest in collective creative experimentation. The programme is part of our developing partnership with the University of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing and our thanks goes to them and the University’s LiNK programme for their support”

Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Department of English, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool said:
“We are delighted to be working with Open Eye Gallery in such an exciting way. The establishment of the residency will provoke useful dialogue between photographers and poets, establishing new and creative contexts for practitioners from visual and literary arts as well as developing important links with communities across Liverpool”

New Writer in Residence, Pauline Rowe said:
“I’m delighted to have the opportunity to work with Open Eye Gallery at the start of an innovative project working with and exploring the ways writing and photography can speak new words, new responses, new relationships”

Pauline first got the chance to work with the Gallery through the LiNK programme at the University of Liverpool and continuing work is being supported by the universities’ Centre for New and International Writing. She has 2 poetry collections, also works as a poet delivering projects at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, and is currently doing a PHD at Liverpool University. Pauline lives with her husband and 6 children.

pauline@openeye.org.uk / paulineroweblog.wordpress.com

Founded in Brighton in 1933, Spectrum are a longstanding professional imaging lab specialising in high quality fine art and photographic printing, as well as archival mounting. For our Liverpool Biennial 2016 exhibition, Spectrum have been working on archival contact sheets from photographer Dave Sinclair.

Sinclair captured the 1985 Youth Training Scheme protest, which saw over 10,000 school children take to the streets of Liverpool. At a time of 80% unemployment in the City, the young people where standing against the Conservative governments compulsory, unskilled, unpaid scheme. They marched from St Georges Hall down to the Pier Head, where Open Eye Gallery is located. Japanese artist Koki Tanaka has re-staged this protest and invited original participants from the protest to reflect on the past and look to the future.

The installation at Open Eye Gallery consists of billboard prints, videos and interviews from Koki Tanaka’s re-staging of the protest, as well as reproduction prints from Dave Sinclair’s original photographs.

Spectrum have scanned three of Dave Sinclair’s archival contact sheets and made overall corrections to match the original prints. The contact sheets have then been enlarged and printed as C-Type Matt prints before being mounted on Dibond with battens fixings.

Visit our Liverpool Biennial 2016 exhibition from 9 July – 16 October 2016.

If you have an enquiry for Spectrum, get in contact with their fantastic customer service team.

Website: spectrumphoto.co.uk
Telephone: 01273 708222
Email: enquiries@spectrumphoto.co.uk

Spectra

Public Participation:
Friday 8 July 2016, 6pm-8pm
Saturday 9 July 2016, 11:30am-4:30pm
Sunday 10 July 2016, 11:30am-4:30pm

Installation Dates:
9 July – 16 October 2016

London based artists Walter & Zoniel invite you to help them create a new Wall Work installation, Spectra.

Open Eye Gallery will be transformed as the artists invite the public to launch paint directly at the outside wall using catapults!

The interactive artwork uses elements key to Walter & Zoniel’s practice including fun, surrealism and transforming buildings that are familiar to us.

The installation creates a sense of mischief, and explores its relationship to inspiration and creativity. By crossing the lines of what is normally allowed, those interacting with the work are, for a moment, set free of some of the constraints of the everyday.

Get involved and help Walter & Zoniel create this new installation!

In collaboration with Gazelli Art House.

gazelliarthouse.com   /   walterandzoniel.com

Tromarama

Telling Tales

Rose Howey Cooperative Gallery

Rose Howey is a housing co-operative established in the L8 area of Liverpool to address issues around poverty, housing, parenting, and education. Open Eye Gallery is pleased to be partnering Rose Howey Cooperative Gallery in their programme activity unfolding throughout Liverpool Biennial 2016 as they embark on establishing a gallery and performance space. The collaboration emerges as an expression of the gallery’s history, rooted in the origins and expression of art and activism.

rosehowey.wordpress.com

Address:
By invitation only, please email rosehoweycooperative@gmail.com

July 1,2,3
1-3 July 2016, Friday 12pm-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm-8pm

MaMa Choir Performance
(This event takes place at Open Eye Gallery and is a free, drop in event)
Saturday 16 July 2016, 1pm-1:30pm

30 Years On: Chernobyl Exposed
29-31 July 2016, Friday 12pm-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm-8pm

The Event Room
5-7 August 2016, Friday 12pm-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm-8pm

Transmutable Voices: New Aesthetics Of Citizenship
2-4 September 2016, Friday 12pm-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm-8pm

Transatlantic Rumors: Alternatives To Urban Capitalism
7-9 October 2016, Friday 12pm-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12pm-8pm

Exhibition Dates:
6-11 July 2016, 10am-6pm

Address:
45-61 Duke Street, Liverpool, L1 5AP

As part of our Biennial Fringe Programme, Thomas Dukes has curated an exhibition of work from seven artists from the Royal College of Art.

The featured artists make use of photography, text, moving image, sculpture and sound to delve into the recreation of experience.

The work takes as its subject ideas around, and expressions of, emotion and experience – two areas that are considered personal. But these experiences are subject to an increasingly connected world, one in which we are encouraged to share as much of our lives with groups from close family to complete strangers.

The projects on display reconsider how we express these aspects of experience in society. The personal becomes stages (and in some cases re-staged) in moments of reflection, online and through art.

Artists:
Iris Brember
Theo Ellison
Sarah Howe
Ben McDonnell
Joshua Phillips
Mark Sedge
Dominic Till

Twitter: @TellingTalesRCA
Instagram: @tellingtalesrca

Exhibition Dates:
9-31 July 2016 / Tuesday-Sunday / 10am-6pm

Address:
Apartment 603, One Park West, 31 Strand Street, Liverpool, L1 8LN
(Please ring the doorbell and you will be shown up to the apartment)

As part of our Biennial Fringe Programme, Indonesian collective Tromarama exhibit for the first time in the UK in the unusual setting of a private residential apartment.

Widely considered one of Indonesia’s most exciting rising talents, Tromarama provide an exploration of how the digital world redefines our existential existence. Formed in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans Maruli and Ruddy Hatumena and graduating from the Institute of Technology in Bandung, the three are among the first generation of artists who were confronted with the impact of the digital revolution in Indonesia during the early 2000s. This exhibition presents a selection of recent animations and lenticular prints, as well as a new work, which was created especially for the occasion.

The exhibition features animations that combine HD photographs of animated objects, such as shoes, suitcases, desk lights and wires, with images of the urban Indonesian landscape. Although each work exists in a seemingly foreign public sphere elsewhere in the world, it interacts with a private one that we, the audience, all possess ourselves. They activate otherwise impossible narratives within a domestic space, behind a closet, through a bedroom window, inside a kitchen cupboard. A new work highlights the playfulness of tea making, an otherwise mundane and joyful ritual undertaken countless times in everyone’s daily lives in the UK.

Play, in the sense of ‘fresh, intriguing and humorous’ pulsates through the body of Tromarama’s practice, which combines video animation with music and installation. Each work, rather than existing in viewership isolation, is woven into the larger social fabric of the things we do both inside and outside our homes.

At the heart of Tromarama’s practice is the creation of an inclusive narrative through the use of form and colour, objects and figures, sounds and rhythms. Each work literally animates the ordinary and weaves its existence into a tale of tribulations fuelled by consequence. As such, their work infuses the ordinary with novel means of contemplation in the context of urban life, developments and political reverberations.

Curated by Ying Tan.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Open Eye Gallery with support by Edouard Malingue Gallery.

edouardmalingue.com

University of South Wales BA (Hons) Photographic Art Graduate Show 2016

*Formerly University of Newport

One likes to think that an artist is innately capable of producing emotive work simply because they are artistic. Although this can be the case for the very lucky few, most artists have had an education in their practice – like a muscle, the creative mind and it’s processes need to be trained.

Art degrees have taken a fair bit of flack recently – sometimes, correctly so. It is difficult to guide a group of largely 20-somethings from a base level to an ‘artist’ in three years. The fruit of this short period takes the form of the degree show which is expected to be, and too often described as, ‘up-and-coming’ or even more optimistically: ‘emerging’. A degree show cannot be fully curated as each student is represented regardless of quality and usually with an equal amount of wall space shared between the class.

Understandably then, the idea of a self-organised exhibition by a large group of very new and very different artists would strike terror into the hearts of many with an interest in visual culture. It is abhorrently far too easy to conjure up a caricature: a rag-tag band of students throwing together the amalgamation of three years worth of experimentation into a cramped space, simply because, pitifully, this concept is by no means rare.

The description of the stereotypical degree show above is a far cry from the confident, bold work by University of South Wales’* Photographic Art students. The show and subsequent publication has a certain self effacing humour, as does a lot of the work within them, this tone is perfectly captured in the title: ‘Have We Started Yet?’. The publication is well designed, perfectly functioning as an efficient exhibition catalogue of sorts whilst also managing to define the kaleidoscopic cacophony that is the exhibition itself. To describe the show as a kaleidoscope infers that ‘Have We Started Yet?’ is in some way psychedelic. Perhaps this makes the choice of word a poor representation of the clear separation between bodies of work. “Separation” is not used to identify physical space, which was admittedly a little in short supply, but rather to describe the clear choices of medium and style between each of the pieces.

Turner House Gallery was awash with bold colours and fit to bursting with large, confident work that seemed to jostle a little for space from the floorboards to (and through) the ceiling in an equally playful way. Not restrained to tradition in any sense but almost trying to distance itself from or gleefully satirise photographic and indeed art history. There is a real sense of fun running throughout nearly every aspect of the show and in the same vein is relentless experimentation both in the concepts and actual aesthetics of what each artist has managed to produce. ‘Have We Started Yet?’ is a degree show which showcases some very real talent by very capable artists, however, one does not frequent degree shows to see artists in their prime. One visits a degree show rather to experience an explosion; a celebration of pride as students forcing their heads under the curtain of the ‘art world’, perhaps for the first time, realise that there are more people on the other side, welcoming and willing them to wriggle further through. It is truly joyous to witness and honestly inspiring to be part of.

Best of luck to you, graduates of 2016. I can only look forward to see more of you soon.

—

‘Have We Started Yet?’ was on display at Turner House Gallery 11 – 16 June 2016 in association with Ffotogallery.

Have We Started Yet? Facebook / Twitter

Words and images by Declan Connolly

Welcome from our housing cooperative in Liverpool. You join us as we embark on establishing a gallery and performance space in the heart of our home – the ‘main’ room of the building – today referred to by its dwellers as the ‘Events Room’.

From its beginnings in the 1850’s, this room (and the house itself) has constantly been a place of human interaction and co-operation; whether to dine, discuss or debate, the space remains central and integral to our co-existence. It is not only residents that benefit from and use this room: The events room welcomes a migrant women’s choir practice, Paper Wings band rehearsals, creative writing and science clubs for kids and a Community kitchen once a month where all the different groups come together to share food and thoughts and fundraise for a crisis fund which aids women seeking sanctuary in the UK from gender based violence.

Over the next few months, we are hosting a series of intimate exhibitions in the Events Room alongside the Liverpool Biennial and will be creating online versions of the exhibitions for the Open Eye Gallery blog. Alongside the works there will be writings that explore the process from the different artistic perspectives of co-operative members.

The first in the series is ‘1, 2, 3…Origins and expressions of political desires’ – is an introduction to the artists exhibiting over the summer and showcases the history, the diversity, and the creative production of co-operative members and friends.

The project began with three co-operative residents over espresso in the tea kitchen.

Pamela Mastrilli is an Italian social researcher and photographer currently working with Migrant Artists Mutual Aid (MaMa) who uses photography to examine and capture gestures of harmony defining a post-colonial British citizenship.

Jennifer Verson, performance artist and artistic director of MaMa, is showing documentary photographs of her work with the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army alongside documentary images of her current work to explore how migration and motherhood impact art and activism.

Parisian photographer, Ulysse Di Meglio, currently studying for his Masters in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University, has been documenting the co-op and its Event Room for over two years in order to explore the co-operative use of space and more widely, co-operative living in the UK. He is exhibiting his photographic documentation in situ.

Each of the ten artists to feature in ‘1, 2, 3…’ will exhibit work that expresses their personal relationship to dissent, social engagement and radical social change.

The desire to participate in social change by breaking down binaries and boundaries and allowing artists to flourish as both creator and subject, is an inspiration behind the conception of this project.

The collaboration between the co-operative and the Open Eye Gallery emerges as an expression of the gallery’s history, rooted in the origins and expression of art and activism. These events re-imagine that origin and is an expression of a shared political desire for contemporary Liverpool.

As part of our coinciding schedule of events the MaMa choir will be performing the Open Eye gallery atrium on the 16th of July at 1pm.

rosehowey.wordpress.com

Open Eye Gallery is now closed to the public whilst we install our new exhibition:

Liverpool Biennial 2016

Featuring: Koki Tanaka / Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni / Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh & Hesam Rahmanian

Liverpool Biennial 2016 unfolds throughout the landscape of the city. It is organised as a story narrated in several episodes: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children, Monuments from the Future, Software and Flashback. Open Eye Gallery’s exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2016 has a particular focus on the Flashback and Children’s episodes. The Flashback episode presents a way of experiencing history as it punctures the present, unexpectedly. The Children’s episode invites artists to consider children as the primary audience, making work with and for them.

Preview Night
Friday 8 July 2016, 6-8pm

Exhibition Continues
9 July – 16 October 2016

Phoebe Kiely is a photographer currently based in Manchester.

They Were My Landscape was a project which was first shown at Phoebe’s degree show at Manchester School of Art in June 2015. It was this project which was shown at Open Eye Gallery 15 April – 5 June 2016 as part of the Open 2: Pieces of You exhibition.

To mark the opening of the new Tate Modern building, from June 17th until June 19th two of Phoebe’s images from They were my Landscape will be shown in the Turbine Hall using digital screens.

cargocollective.com/phoebekiely

www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/new-tate-modern/building

Open Eye Gallery was delighted to welcome Maria Percival (Relationship Manager, North, Arts Council England) to speak during the launch of Collected Possibilities and Pieces of Us.

Collected Possibilities presents a curated exhibition showcasing work from final year students of Hugh Baird University Centre. This exhibition comes out of an ongoing collaboration with the BA (Hons) Digital Imaging and Photography course, whereby dialogue between Open Eye Gallery and the students has provided critical feedback and suggested creative context on these final major projects.

Throughout our recent Open 2: Pieces of You exhibition, four emerging artists provided a series of workshops to four schools across the Wirral and Liverpool. The workshops were supported by the Curious Minds organisation and it’s Specialist Leaders in Cultural Education (SLiCE) programme. We have produced a video which captures the essence of the programme and the young people’s experiences of the workshops, titled Pieces of Us, which is displayed on our new Digital Window Gallery.

Maria Percival: Opening speech

Arts Council England’s role is to champion, develop and invest in arts and culture in England. Our Mission is ‘Great art and culture for everyone’. We support the arts, museums and libraries – from theatre to digital art, reading to dance, music to literature, and crafts to collections. But we’re about much more than just funding. We have a development role, which means we give advice and promote partnership. And through this we hope to develop a thriving arts ecology that offers everybody the chance to enjoy, participate and create. Our mission can be distilled into two core goals: we want excellent arts and culture to thrive, and we want as many people as possible to engage with it. Children and young people are at the heart of what we do. We want to help release their talent, to give them the chance to work with the best professional artists – and to show them routes to work in one of the wide range of careers in the creative industries, if they wish. Above all, we want the arts to enrich their lives – whether as artists, or as audiences. And we believe that there should be no barriers to talent.

And this goes further – Arts Council England’s promise is to support people to enjoy a learning continuum in arts and culture and high quality life experiences from early years to entering the world of work and beyond. To this end we deliver, or support others to deliver, a range of national schemes for children and young people, including Bridge organisations – we invest £10 million a year in 10 Bridge organisations who play a vital role in building local cultural alliances, increasing provision for children and young people, and who collectively now work with more than 7000 schools. We also engage with other development activity which overlaps and complements this, for instance our talent development work and which focuses on supporting artists at all career stages. And also on developing centres of regional excellence outside of London where talent can thrive.

Building partnerships between FE/HE and arts and cultural organisations offer perhaps the most useful place to develop formal and informal pathways for learning. Recognising this ACE has committed through its corporate plan to build effective partnerships with further and higher education institutions to ensure that artistic talent and workforce diversity is being developed and nurtured and to encourage more FE/HEs to work closely with arts and cultural organisations to support the arts and culture ecology in their localities.

And there are strong contextual reasons for this, the down-grading of the arts throughout the education system, the threat to practice based courses from: the introduction of tuition fees, also opportunities such as the education sector’s adoption of public engagement strategies and the cultural shift implied within the HEI Research Excellence Framework which emphasises impact of research beyond the academic sphere.

In the North there is and has been for a while a very strong and distinctive approach. The number and strength of these partnerships here has led to the development, with Arts Council support of, Culture Forum North – an open network of alliances between Higher Education and the Arts across the North and which acts as a platform through which this work can be championed, shared and developed to enable impact beyond individual partnerships – regionally and nationally.

Through 2016 Forum partners are working together on three key agendas: Research, civic, talent. All of which chime with Arts Council’s strategic priorities. And for the partners provide a key opportunity to look at what the civic role of each is in a city and how they can create an increased civic impact by working together.

As Juan Cruz (former Director of Liverpool School of Art and Design, LJMU) has said:

‘[So] we recognise in the university and in arts organisations that our success is intimately tied to the success of the city, and that we all effectively play for the city, delivering high quality art experience and education that also contributes to the cities’ broader aims and agendas.’

Specific examples of exemplary partnerships in the North, include:

1. LJMU’s model of embedded lecturer posts based in arts organisations, at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial and FACT

2. Northumbria University’s embedded staff and programme development with the Baltic in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in particular with the Baltic 39 space and which includes artist studios

3. The University of Bolton’s new BA (Hons) Theatre co-designed and delivered with the Octagon Theatre Bolton, one of the UK’s most successful regional producing theatres

4. Manchester Metropolitan University’s launch pad programme with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, which offers artist support and showcasing at the emerging end of artistic practice and, like Collected Possibilities, offers a public platform for MMU’s annual degree show

The characteristics of these partnerships nationally can be broadly identified as being designed to: maximise current and develop new resources; add value; further shared aspirations; meet individual corporate performance targets or objectives; raise profile; realise new opportunities. A recurring theme nationally, in terms of what unlocks this potential, is that leadership at the top – CEO or Vice Chancellor level – significantly aides the sustainability, investment in and prioritisation of partnership work. Leading to outcomes such as: greater resilience; stronger programmes; work ready graduates; more student applications; higher profile appointments; more valuable assets; learning organisations; place making; extended audiences; and greater national and international profile. All of which chime with increasing emphasis within the recent H.E. White Paper on: the quality of the student experience, which includes relationships with industry in designing, developing and delivering courses; and developing work ready students. Very few (if any) of these partnerships are with HE-delivered-within F.E. institutions, such as this one with Hugh Baird University Centre. And this example is compelling in what it can teach us and offer in terms of extending the possibilities to support talent across a greater range of demographics and lifelong learning. With the greater flexibility in terms of living costs associated with undertaking degrees in this context, there is great opportunity to support diversity within artistic excellence and the next generation of artists. As well as opportunities to retain local talent and which is a key element of Arts Council’s talent development agenda.

As with all the partnerships we see, there is a strong and complementary fit between Open Eye and Hugh Baird – the shared photography focus but also Open Eye’s experience as an artist support agency and learning organisation offering vocational and professional experiences to a range of artists, professional and amateur, since launching in 1977. Collected Possibilities and Pieces of Us demonstrate two sides of the talent development challenge. Collected Possibilities presents us with the next generation of photographers, or arts workers potentially, before they emerge either as creative practitioners, into the world of work or further study. Pieces of Us shows us artists a step on, perhaps gaining their first paid professional experience as an artist, in turn inspiring a younger generation working alongside them. The opportunity to apply their skills to the real world and earn income is an invaluable demonstration of the next challenges ahead: how to navigate earning a living as an artist. And which is where the arts Council also seeks to invest and to work in partnership to enable more artists from a greater diversity of backgrounds to make a viable living as an artist, in a locale that can support artists careers through all stages of their development. And which again requires national schemes and structures, delivered via a place-based approach, but that’s another story …

Congratulations to the partnership and very importantly to the artists whose talent is clearly evident.

This year’s nominees display a wide range of approaches with diverse bodies of work exploring political and personal concerns with identity, surveillance, migration and loss. With works emotionally and visually captivating, it’s no surprise that these four artists were shortlisted for this award.

Here are this year’s nominees:

Laura El-Tantawy has been shortlisted for her self-published photobook, In the Shadow of the Pyramids, which features images spanning from 2005 to 2014.

Although she was born in England, El-Tantawy was also partly brought up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia; she says the project stemmed from a desire to reconnect with a country she no longer knew. El-Tantawy began exploring the essence of Egyptian identity with the hopes that she would eventually come to terms with her own and in doing so created this intimate body of work which was guided by her childhood memories via her own family archive. Overtime the project gained a sense of urgency following the Egyptian Revolution prompted by Mubarak’s resignation in 2011 when he was forced to stand down after a wave of mass protests.

This body of work provides the viewer with an intimate, powerful and somewhat heart-breaking insight into the past and present everyday realities that Egyptians face not knowing what the future holds for their country or for themselves alike.

Erik Kessels has been shortlisted for his project, Unfinished Father, which was exhibited at Fotografia Europea, Italy from 15th May – 31st July in 2015.

In 2014, Kessels’ father suffered a stroke causing his motor skills to dramatically decrease and left him barely able to talk. Prior to this, Kessel’s father was extremely active with many side projects, one of them being the restoration of a little Fiat 500 classic. The images throughout this body of work are essentially Kessels take on the fragmented realities of loss and memory as a result of his father’s devitalising stroke, using his father’s unfinished restoration project of the Fiat 500 to representation of his current condition; ‘like his car, his father will never be complete, but remain unfinished’. Kessels brought pieces of the unfinished car into the exhibition space and presented them alongside photographs of car parts and images that his father had taken concluding this intimate and personal project which many viewers will also relate to.

Trevor Paglen was shortlisted for his project, The Octopus, which was displayed at the Frankfurter Kunstverein museum in Germany from 20th June – 30th August in 2015.

Known for his work tackling mass surveillance, Paglan untiringly collaborated with scientists, amateur astronomers and human rights activists in order to make this project happen. The Octopus explores a collection of what may be seen as sometimes quite touchy topics including data collection, military surveillance, classified drone and satellite activities and the systems of power that affix them together.

Arguably this project started in 2013 when Paglen hired a helicopter to take night-time aerial shots across the US of National Security Agencies that are responsible for all national security apparatus, including the extremely controversial drone programme. Some suggest that Paglen’s earlier work exploring mass surveillance is more visually striking and perhaps even more captivating than his later aerial shots, which are quite repetitive; nevertheless, through his work, Paglen demonstrates that secrets cannot be hidden from sight and that traces and structures will always remain and be a part of the US landscape. Paglen is a significant contribution to current issues dealing with the impact of unseen aspects of technology on our day to day lives.

Tobias Zielony is the fourth and final artist shortlisted for his project, The Citizen, which was exhibited as part of the German Pavilion presentation at the Venice Bienale from 9th May – 22nd November 2015 and is currently on display at the Kow gallery in Berlin until 12th June, 2016.

With most of these images taken in Hamburg and Berlin, Zielony’s lens portrays the lives of African refugee activists living in Europe and the struggles they face on a daily basis. Many escaping the oppression and violence in their home countries arrive in the West in search of security and freedom, only to find themselves living as outsiders in refugee-camps without work permits or legal representation. Zielony candidly documents these African refugees who are on the fringes of society in the most intimate and voyeuristic light, making this body of work all the more ambiguous and captivating in the eyes of the viewer.

The images are presented alongside first person accounts of life as an African refugee living in Europe today, along with interviews and narratives published by Zielony in African newspapers and magazines whilst he was reporting on the refugees’ journeys and experiences.

Works by the nominated artists will be exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery from 16th April until 26th June 2016 and will later be presented at the Deutsche BÖrse HQ in Frankfurk/Eschborn. A prize of £30,000 will be rewarded to a photographer of any nationality for a specific body of work in exhibition or publication format which is felt to have significantly contributed to photography in Europe between 1st October 2014 and 30th September 2015.

Trevor Paglen was announced the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2016 for his work, The Octopus.

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Written by Sam Powell

Open Eye Gallery is now closed to the public whilst we install our new exhibition: Collected Possibilities.

As part of Open Eye Gallery’s ongoing collaboration with the FdA / BA (Hons) Top Up in Digital Imaging and Photography Courses at the Hugh Baird University Centre (which are validated by the University of Central Lancashire), we are pleased to present a curated exhibition showcasing work from the BA final year students.

Open Eye Gallery’s Executive Director Sarah Fisher and Curator Thomas Dukes have worked closely with the staff and undergraduates, providing critical feedback and suggesting creative direction on these final projects.

Preview Night
Tuesday 14 June, 6-8pm

Please join us for our preview night and be the first to see the talented graduates work.

The last five years has heralded some truly innovative technology that has really pushed the boundaries of what consumers can come to expect from the visual market. 2016 is the year of 4k video being produced on a phone, mirrorless, full frame cameras that can compete with DSLRs and ridiculous quality 100-megapixel, medium format behemoths being the trend.

Gone are the days when photography, or rather the photographer, is reliant on having the best kit. Brilliant digital cameras capable of producing professional results are available from amateur level price-tags on the high street. These ‘entry level’ DSLRs do not vary much between brands in terms of their rather impressive picture quality, especially when in their respective automatic modes to the point where to be entrusted with an old manual camera today would be simply too slow and inaccurate in unfamiliar hands.

When digital cameras made their first appearance, the quality of the image, although revolutionary and exciting, was completely redundant in terms of what a film camera could produce. Since it’s conception, digital technology has had to prove itself within the existing market of camera users in order to stake its claim of superiority. In order to do so, modern cameras had to be able to surpass celluloid relatively and in their own field- this is why the top end DSLRs today are called ‘full-frame’. The term ‘full-frame’ relates to the physical size of the sensor plane able to record an image- that is: 36mm x 24mm, or, in other terms: the exact size of a 35mm film frame.

The sensitivity of the instruments and of the algorithms used within DSLRs today can indeed rival and at times surpass 35mm film in terms of scientifically representing an environment. Teamed with highly intelligent auto modes and a seemingly endless amount of space to record multiple images – photography has never been easier or more consistently able to produce impressive results.

The question, then, if digital photography is in its prime, is this: why is experimental, analogue, chemical-based photography becoming increasingly popular?

2016 will see both Kodak and Impossible bring out new cameras to herald the “analogue renaissance”, the first of which being released only last month: Impossible’s I-1. This camera will feel familiar and nostalgic, as would anything using such an iconic and recognizable format known as a Polaroid. At its core, the I-1 is a Polaroid camera and can be used as such. Essentially, this is a point and shoot camera that produces chemically volatile images that are at the very edge of the spectrum of visual reliability. The creation of this camera in 2016 is interesting enough but what comes in the box is only half of the creature. Whilst the I-1 appears to belong in the 20th century, the second half of the I-1 exists in app form (iOS) and very much belongs to the smartphone generation. The app connects the camera to an iPhone and completely transforms the ‘Polaroid’ into the real I-1. The original automatic point and shoot is left behind as you are handed the controls to the first ever fully manual digital instant camera. The app allows the use of manual shutterspeed, aperture and double exposure, to but name a few.

The I-1’s manual mode opens up a whole range of creative options akin to what one would expect from a more traditional camera body- Impossible have given the user and the machine the ability to attempt consistency but also the film stock to completely destroy that illusion. By no means should the I-1’s audience be able to know exactly what is going to spit out of the camera’s belly. Impossible, like Polaroid before them do not create precision tools- they make a photographic toy box. What is produced from the I-1 and its 8-frame film cartridge should be unexpected and exciting.

Still, the question of why technically inferior methods of making an image are causing such a stir has to be raised. The history of photography is a brief one that began in a kind of alchemy- it was a very unstable process that resulted in a skewed vision of our world on glass and paper. What made the images magical were that they did not represent the world at all but instead showed very human mistakes towards making a perfect rendering of the external scene. These same ‘mistakes’ are present within the painter’s brush strokes or the poet’s vocabulary; it is what characterizes authorship and also what is lacking from the algorithms used throughout most digital cameras produced today.

The I-1 is by no means perfect- it simply shouldn’t be. The I-1 is a novel, experimental and refreshing break from the automatic nature of 21st century media.

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WRITTEN BY DECLAN CONNOLLY

Images courtesy of Impossible’s website and Impossible’s Instagram.

Photographer Stephen Iles and sculptor Nicola Dale collaborate to explore the possibilities of photography to communicate an understanding of a subject. Their work is currently on display as part of Open 2: Pieces of You.

This interview has been conducted by Pauline Rowe, who is currently at Open Eye Gallery on a PhD placement from the University of Liverpool.

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Pauline Rowe: How and why did you become an artist?

Stephen Iles: I’m not sure if being an artist is something you choose to become or something you are.  At first it is a title conferred upon you when as a child you show an aptitude for drawing on creative activity and you subsequently begin to assume it as an identity. Sometimes I’m an artist and sometimes I’m a photographer. I’d say I’m an artist in the approach I take as a photographer but not necessarily that everything I produce is the work of an artist.

It may be common to photographers to equivocate with the term ‘artist’ given the rather complicated history between photography and art. I’m happy to be called either but what interests me most is that as we transition from the title photographer to that of artist we do not automatically confer the title art to all our images. We may call our photographs art but they are most resolutely still photographs with properties that resist consumption by ‘art’. The way photography can equivocate in this way, being art if we call it such whilst still having an independent authority all it’s own allows me to work with a camera to explore what art might be, pointing the camera at art in the hope that it may reveal itself.

PR: Can you say something about the camera you prefer to use and why?

SI: In these times the preference expressed most often concerns the choice of medium, either film or digital. I use both medium,preference often being dictated by technical suitability for a particular application, other times because it is the camera at hand.

I have owned and used many film cameras over time, each with their different qualities and quirks. Currently I prefer a 6×7 medium format camera when working with film, the more squared format of the image more easily references painting, maybe creating a more settled image whereas a more stretched 35mm image references cinema, television and suggests movement.

Working with digital more often these days, I am aware how some of the preferences I had working with a film camera bleed into the digital environment. I prefer a digital camera with a more squared crop for example and the lenses are the same for both medium and have as much to do with the resultant image as the camera does.

The question of style in relation to the camera and subsequent technical processes is always prominent. Style is something we develop through doing, it becomes a signature of ourselves as the artist but it is also tethered to the quite specific and narrow characteristics of the technology. Working with digital I’ve found the greater flexibility and less distinctive thumbprint [than that we find with individual film types] encourages me to search for a more neutral, less stylised space and to employ multiple styles in order to try and escape the notion of style. Working and collaborating with many different artists I try not to impose my style upon their work but rather try different approaches and cameras depending upon the context.

In a sense a preference for a particular camera is like a fetish, as objects they combine magical and tactile properties so well. Their complexity makes them different to a tool, [like a brush or a chisel.] Cameras bring with them their own character and characteristics, affording them their own voice and a quota of authorship, becoming a part of the collaboration.

PR: Also, how do you select, edit, process your images and then decide on a final sequence and order etc.,?

SI: It’s hard to define a specific process relating to selection. With each different collaboration the approach is likely to be different, either confirming or disrupting narrative, depending again on context. Though I do find it interesting that as much as we make selections, we still seem to have thousands of them, maybe when we press the delete button to deselect we are making a most definitive selection!

PR: What is the difference for you between photographing an artist/sculptor as a collaborative work and a photograph as portraiture?

SI: In a sense photographing an artists work is always a collaboration, between both the individuals involved and between the object and the camera. Working within a premeditated collaboration allows an exploration of the intersection between the work being completed and it being photographed.

There is always a tension between what a photograph is and what we might want to say about or attribute to it, a tension between notions of intention and authorship.  When we describe a photograph of an artist or their work as a portrait we confer the authorship to the photographer, the artist submits themselves and their work and with it authorship of the image to the photographer. The artist is still the author of the work shown in the image but not of the image itself.

In submitting to be photographed, the work goes through a metaphysical process whereby it becomes something else. It is not necessarily a copy, as it is now represented in another medium. It’s dimensions and materiality have been altered. The image begins to take on multiple identities, the relationship between the original object and its image begin to blur.

PR: It seems important that these images not only question the framing and stillness of photographs but also capture internal spaces – can you comment on the space in which the images are set – and why this is important?

SI: A camera gobbles up space with a voracious appetite, in a fraction of a second it can render an inordinate amount of information. When the camera photographs a space it photographs all the things in that space and a narrative begins to emerge where the image can be seen to be about that space, or the content of that image can be subjected to further narratives and concerns.

By working in a more neutral studio space, [which provides minimal visual information about itself] the notion of space as it exists within the camera  begins to become more prominent. It’s about trying to address the idea of a ubiquitous space as opposed to a specific one, to marvel at the cameras ability to dialogue with space rather than to simply copy it.

PR: Has this collaboration with Nicola been challenging in ways you did not expect – and, if so, how?

SI: Through collaboration we can take this event, [photographing a piece of work] and begin to stretch it. We can explore the degree to which a physical work may be conceived as image as much as object and reflect upon the fact that works are seen, [and therefore known?] more by their image than by their physical presence. We can ask to what degree does the object serve the image when the more accepted scenario is one of the image serving the object.

PR: Is there anything else you think important to add?

SI: The majority of my photography work is to some degree or other in collaboration with other artists where the challenge of representing art through photography is the central concern.  The ambiguities that exist between a work and a photograph of that work and the ensuing skewing of things like intention determine a constant adjustment of expectations.

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Poems linked to ideas, energy and themes in Steve Iles’s work:

Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits: Elizabeth Jenningshttp://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/rembrandts-late-self-portraits

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Wallace Stevens
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503

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A PDF pack containing interviews with each of the artists exhibiting in Open 2: Pieces of You is available to download here.