Becky Warnock is an artist and organiser with a background in facilitation. Her work seeks to engage with questions of identity and the politics of representation. During the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Warnock embarked on the project A World Between Us, running a series of workshops with participants from varying photography backgrounds to explore the limits of language when discussing mental health. In this interview with Adele Robinson, she discusses her recent work on the climate crisis, her influences, and how she considers the critical position in photographic practice.

Adele Robinson: How did it all begin, when did photography become one of your ways of expression?

Becky Warnock: I came to photography in a slightly roundabout route. I was always quite creative. I come from a very scientific, engineering family and I’m dyslexic and not scientific in any way. I was a bit of an oddball in our family. My dad really wanted me to be an architect but my maths wasn’t very good, so that didn’t happen. 

I trained at drama school in London in Applied Theatre – which is about working with communities using performance. I think if I’m honest, everyone thought I would probably come out and be a teacher. 

Then during my second year we got sent on a placement in a community group. The idea was that we ran a project with them and start to develop our own practices and gain experience of facilitation. The setting that I got sent to was a prison in Nottingham. I was working with a group of fathers who were inside to put on a children’s theatre performance for their kids to come in and see them during a visit. I loved it. I really learned a lot in terms of thinking about what I wanted the arts to be. I guess there were elements of teaching within that. 

I got offered a job in the prison and moved to Doncaster in my final year of being at drama school. I was working as part of a team to run various different kinds of arts and media based projects in the prison. Some of them were about working with families and others were learning professional skills for the guys to use when they were out. One of the challenges with theatre is that it happens and then it is gone, right? It’s experiential. For funding, we needed to document what we were doing. It was really difficult for us to get a photographer in, because of security restrictions. However, it was possible for us to get a camera. So I ended up using the camera, and the more I learnt, the more I realised that I was really excited by the possibilities of it. Later I went and did an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC. 

I’m interested in how the camera can be a way of connecting with people. Sometimes for myself if I’m making work exploring something personal, but also if I’m working with other people, it’s about how we better understand the world and each other through that process. 

What do you want to portray to others with your socially engaged photography practice?

When you initially sent me this question, I really struggled with it. What do I want to portray? Then I realised, I’m not sure I would describe my work as a portrayal. I think my way of working is about finding a way of visualising the interaction that I’m having with that person or group of people. It’s not fair to say that the images are secondary, but the images are definitely a reflection of a process that we’ve been on. They are about how we find our way through an idea or an issue. There’s always this element of exchange that happens in my projects. 

There’s also a critical position within my work in which I want to interrogate my privilege and invite others to too. I want people to think about who they are and what that means, the structures that we exist in and how we might challenge them. It is about building empathy and what Paolo Freire describes as ‘critical consciousness’. This idea feeds in throughout my work – how do we understand where we are and how can we change it?  

As a photographer, you can have many other influences around you and can be seen through your work. What are your main influences?

Paolo Freire’s Theatre of the Oppressed, hugely informs how I think, facilitate, and now my teaching and lecturing work. I draw a lot on my background in performance.

In terms of artists, I’m really lucky that some of the people that I would say influence my work the most are the people that I have in my life, people that are my friends or mentors. D Wiafe who has been interviewed by SEP before, Jamila Prowse, who’s a writer, artist and former curator, Helen Cammock who I assist sometimes, who is a really important friend and mentor to me. There are many others. 

Tell me about the future for your photography and what is next in store?

I am currently working on a project with a group of young people in Coventry and Kampala in Uganda around climate change and how we might make a difference in the climate crisis. I’m also working on a project that extends a project that I did last year about mental health, language and connection, but this project is specifically about masculinity and mental health. 

I am also making a body of work with my dad. He is from just outside of Belfast, Ireland. I am currently making a piece with him that I guess is probably the most personal project I’ve made before. We’re thinking together about Britishness; how I understand it, how he does and what that means more broadly. It is about family and what makes us who we are but also contextualising it in the political history there. 

Then I’m also working on a wider project called Terms of Engagement which is more of a research process. It looks at the language that we use, particularly in socially engaged practice – words like ‘collaboration’, ‘ethics’, ‘representation’.  Every artist or practitioner has completely different understandings of what those words might mean. When we initially started the project it was about trying to think about how we might be able to narrow down or refine these terms but actually as we went along we realised actually, no, that’s restrictive. What’s exciting is the possibilities of this language. The project invites artists and practitioners to share their understandings of key terms that we’ve identified and what that looks like in their practices. The first iteration’s publication is hopefully going to be out in the beginning of next year and the next one in the summer. Hopefully, that will continue to build and develop. I’ve got a few things on and I’m really grateful for that.

Images: Work in progress, Speaking in Another Voice, Becky Warnock, 2021

A World Between Us, Becky Warnock, 2020