The National Photography Symposia

A relentlessly cheerful but rainy Liverpool and the style and comfort of The Bluecoat were the settings for this year’s NPS3. I’ve been to all three but haven’t blogged about them before because my responses have been personal, emotive and intimately related to my own work, and in some complex way I didn’t feel they were suitable for the wide, generic audience I’d been getting over on The Photography Pages.

So this isn’t a review, there are others out there 1,2,3 (and I’ll add more as they come), but it is a round-up in a way, a skimming of my own response/s to all three Symposia.

Back in 2009 I was newly out of the horrible experience that had been my photography degree, bitter, impoverished, and ill-equipped to begin any sort of new career. I’d been deskilled, with diminished confidence and awakened to the exploitation, of particularly the wide-eyed young women and boys attempting to enter the ‘industry’. I’ve lived a full professional life, with a rounded career, accustomed to public speaking and with well honed interpersonal skills, exactly the kind of attributes that come in useful in any profession. I walked into Chetham’s Library for NPS1 hoping that somewhere, somehow there might be a clue or two, or three, some way of discovering what on earth to do next, to form some kind of plan.

Nothing’s that easy. That evening I checked back out of the filthy and overpriced city centre hotel within minutes of checking in and drove into the wild green desert of Saddleworth Moor.

Someone tweeted ‘I can’t understand anything @JohnPerivolaris is saying’ and I looked him up. I’m seeking, always seeking ways of seeing beyond the trite, the formulaic, this banal stuff seems so pointless for a third late-life career, when you don’t have 40 years stretching ahead of you, when you don’t have the time to experiment or tinker. I didn’t meet John at #NPS1 but it’s because of him that I went back and discovered other things.

Being in a big professional club is odd. There are stars, but if you don’t know who they are, what they look like, it’s impossible to show them any deference. There are tensions, sometimes the air feels like treacle, but if you don’t know why or who is generating them, it’s easy to slide through and pass them by.

John Kippin, head of MA Photography at Sunderland Uni said at #NPS1: “degree courses are like carpet warehouses, pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap. A few who work in them are good people, but how the devil do you find out who they are?”

Two years on and the landscape of further and higher education has changed beyond all recognition, so the carpet warehouse photography degrees will struggle to continue to exploit and deskill on the same appalling scale. (I can’t tell you how glad I am that my own photography tutor at Newcastle College, an artist and committed over many years to her work, has at last abandoned that institution.*)

In a break-out room at Chetham’s, Ciara Leeming and Steve Judson both showed work-in-progress: the aftermath of the Hull floods was Steve’s presentation. I’ve since met them both, Ciara via the mighty Duckrabbit. Lucky me. They confirmed for me that there are others trying to document ordinary lives in extra-ordinary circumstances, and struggling yes, and sometimes struggling hard, but doing it. Doing it. Doing it anyway.

And then there were extraordinary characters giving compelling presentations: Hodgson, Hoffman, Davies, and the big boy personalities Jenkins and Steele-Perkins. An opinionated lot, and very glad we are of it.

So I went back in 2010, to #NPS2 in Derby and met Laura Hynd, Denise Swanson, Bridget McKenzie, Karin Bareman, Jill Jennings, Brian Griffin. I asked a few questions, contributed a bit here and there, I began to feel at home among these people. Not comfortable, never comfortable, but sparked, prodded, pushed, pulled.

Go and see those pictures. In fact go to Liverpool this month and see them all. The Look2011 @Look2011 Festival Jill has helped to create is one of the best and most moving collection of activist work I’ve ever seen. It’s never been done like this before. When friends in Belfast in 2007 heard that the Maze and Long Kesh were to be photographed, there was pretty much the consternation and distrust you might expect.

We want to remember the detention without trial, the Hunger Strikes: they were a part of the history of both our communities, of the long struggle for recognition, for a voice, a political expression that wasn’t ever won. But there’s a deep discomfort, still, and an aching sadness at the loss, the wasted lives, the bitterness, an empty ache at the futility of it all. Bobby Sands MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone, dying in prison, a potent symbol of repression and of a gruelling defiance. Photographs can tell this tale in a way my struggling words cannot.

So NPS3 in the Bluecoat foyer, I wanted to thank Jill but the words just would not come, and we talked about and around the applause in the hall for her work and Laura Hynd’s recent bold successes and I hesitated and I tried again but couldn’t, not without a flood of emotion and hey, it’s embarrassing how strongly I feel about this work, to share that in person, in the middle of the day, with not a drop of Jamiesons at hand. This may do. I don’t know.

Go and see Confined at the Bluecoat, see Vanley Burke, see Ian Beesley’s claustrophobic, stifling, suffocating Drift, see everything in that Crypt. This and this is Ian interviewed at Chetham’s in 2009.

I was asked late in the day to give a presentation  at NPS3 and my work and my life in many ways fits so well with the Look2011 theme of A Call To Action. I’ll write about the work  another day, but here are a couple of glimpses from my slide show. I’m 20 years too late to photograph the final closure of the last pit around here, but Late Photography is a current big thing, so here I am with the story, late but it’s all still fresh.

The Redeye Network received a funding boost in the recent Arts Council awards to organisations, and we’re glad they did. We could do with something like Redeye in the north-east, and thank you to NEPN for its early efforts in giving this a go. Work like this is important, and clearly not just to me.

On NPS3′s final Sunday we got on a boat from a song, the eponymous Ferry across the Mersey. John Davies generously gave us a tour of the locations for his magnificent pictures Signs of War which are something else you really need to see. We were drenched to the skin in a continuous steadly drizzle, but it was worth every moment, every footfall.

Click through to see the rest of the pictures, including Side Gallery/Panos Pictures’ own Dean Chapman on the hunt.

Thank you to John Harris, Charlie Baker, Lauren Rooker, Roy Robertson, Colin McPherson, Karen Strunks, Alex Hodby and Denise Swanson for all your words of advice and support. I’m sorry I can’t name you all but I’m so very glad and grateful if you came to my session. And a huge thanks to the very talented Ciara who gave me her spare bedroom and kind company.

There’s something else I need to write. It’s about professionalism, about our occupation. We keep hearing ‘everyone’s a photographer now’. I submit: they are not. Everyone may own a camera, even if only on their phone, but everyone is by no means a photographer and we are in danger of a deep instrospection if we the people who do it every single day keep on saying it is so. I can make ice cream, but I’m not a confectioner. I can hang bookshelves, but I own a Black-and-Decker, I’m not a carpenter or a jobbing builder.

More on this another day. I’m going to draft a set of descriptors, define what ‘a photographer’ is, open to challenge and debate of course, and thinking of writing it as a conversation, and I have a candidate in mind to oppose me. Watch this space. Put me in your RSS reader, follow me on twitter or somewhere. Soon.

The lamp in the Bluecoat foyer says:

“The Fighter: According to ancient Chinese palm reading, the man’s (sic) left hand represents what he was born with physically and materially; and his right hand what he will become.”

Onwards, onwards and upwards, yes?

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* If you ever find yourself reading this, please get in touch.

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