Continued from yesterday
“What is the most meaningful project you’ve done?” – Caroline Hick asked me at our first Re:view meeting.
I knew the answer. A collaboration I did with my mother, called ‘Us’ – for an exhibition for Malaga Fotomanias Festival in 2011, exploring intersections between health, wellbeing, and creativity. Over a period of one month, we worked together to explore these themes through our own relationship and experiences (my mum has had M.E since 1985) via an exchange of photography and text, which included a photo dialogue, a photo blog, text, and photocollage alongside an archive of family photographs. This collaboration was one of deep creative and personal engagement for me. Through a practice of mutual acceptance, openness , cooperation and respect, the project brought us closer together and enriched our relationship, both creatively and emotionally.
My hope was the family archive project could work in a similar way – working with the wider family to share stories and memories and hopefully closer connections between us all.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have been quite concerned with the ethics of the project. Talking to Sarah, Caroline and Andy in my Re:view meetings I realised that these concerns re access and permission though valid, were stopping me making a start. I was stuck.
Andy Abbott suggested making some of my own work in response to the archive to see where it took me and then assess how I was going to deal with facilitating participation. This seemed a sensible suggestion – I had thought I needed to get the ethical framework sorted out first – but the project may develop in and unexpected ways requiring a more responsive approach in terms of ethics. Perhaps a speculative super-sensitivity about the ethics isn’t going to get anything done! After all I can’t predict responses, and there has to be some kind of starting point. Sarah Spanton acknowledged that there were ethical issues in working with one’s own family images (Who owns a photographic image? The subject/the person taking the photo?) and shared her own experiences and reservations in terms of using images from her own family. She suggested that it might be helpful to separate the project into private and public aspects–keeping the sharing of the archive and personal memories as a personal/ private project, and the creative work separate, looking at a means of having conversations about permissions when I had a more specific idea of how I wanted to work or collaborate with the family. She also suggested that family members may not ‘read’ my own work using the archive in the same way as I do. Family photographs trigger very individual and subjective meanings and memories –what each of us see is very different.
My session with Caroline Hick generated a conversation (blogged here last week) about the potential for framing the project much more widely, beyond the personal and therapeutic. Caroline suggested the richness and universality of family photography offered an opportunity to explore cultural, personal and social meanings of family and identity, and to work with members of the public from Bradford’s various communities on their own family archives and experiences of family photography in a process of co-research. I hugely respect Caroline’s practice and approaches in working with people, which have in the last year involved projects engaging with neighbourhoods and marginalised people and places, joint projects inspired by research on dementia activism, visual annotation (note-taking/commentary) for refugee and asylum group conferences, and a series of art and cultural initiatives based on and around the Canterbury estate in Bradford. http://www.brad.ac.uk/gallery/whats-on/autumn12/Fi… Having her perspective on this project has been incredibly valuable.
Looking this week at structuring and describing the project for an ACE bid I’m realising that the collaborative work with my family may be a small element of a much larger project, and I’m seeing the project now with a broader focus, and I’m less worried about the ethical issues, trusting that I’ll deal with these as the project takes a more concrete shape.
‘Fieldworks: Co-researching Self-organised Culture’ a joint exhibition between Andy Abbott and Caroline Hick, is now showing at the University of Bradford http://www.brad.ac.uk/gallery/whats-on/spring-summ…
