A comment on English photography of the 'everyday'.

Recently I have been thinking about photography in England. I think it is very sad that England is

so unpopular within the photography world. Speaking with James O Jenkins last week, a Welsh

photographer making work in England, he noted that at the graduate exhibitions he had visited,

none of the work had been made in the UK. Everybody had sort out more exotic locations to

photograph. It is as if the place you take your picture can make or break it. I don't think this is fair. I

also feel that rather than this. Going to an interesting location or popular country, for example going

to Chile to photograph a family just because they are a Chilean family and therefore more

interesting and different does not make the photograph better. And if it does it is not through any

great skill on the part of the photographer.

Say England is a rubbish place to photograph (something I don't believe) say it is uninteresting, old

fashioned, has too many brick houses, is too green, has rubbish light and rubbish weather which is

neither extremely pleasant or extremely awful, but for the mot part cloudy. Wouldn't it then be quite

brilliant if one were able to take photographs here. Surely creating interest from banality deserves

more merit and is the more exciting thing a photographer can do. London is my home, I do not find

it an interesting place. My idea of it, save some patches like Holland park, is of a grey concrete and

weathered brick maze. Most of us walk through, drive through and cycle through our towns and

cities without looking at anything. In England we do not think there is anything to look at, but I

would suggest that this is exactly the type of environment photographers should be stalking. In

recent years in England we have forgotten the message of the new colour photographers. Those that

keep this aesthetic alive are not thoroughly exhibited and do not get taught in universities

particularly. This tradition that we in England can follow and make use of is 'the every day'. It is an

approach within modernism really. The premise of it is that the photographic image is very

important as art. That a perfectly composed and balanced composition of absolutely anything can be

art – is art. Duchamp and Strand displayed this in their respective representations of toilets.

In the United States this theory remains important in photographic reaching and came to the fore in

the 1970s when the Museum of Modern Art under John Szarkowski and the Guggenheim were

championing this type of photography. The central figure in this movement must be William

Eggleston. Son of southern aristocrats Eggleston didn't need to find a job and so spent and still does

spend a lot of his time walking around the out skirts of Memphis. He photographed everything, no

subject was off the table. The inside of the oven, the kitchen sink and under the bed have all become

timeless subjects of Eggleston's prints. Szarkowski said in the introduction to Eggleston's 'Guide'

that if you were to go to Memphis you would find a town devoid of beauty, and yet through

photography it has become the most perfect and photogenic of locations. It is the photographers

prerogative to find interest where there is none. Photographic interest equates to real disinterest. If

something is too beautiful in reality there is not so much point in your photograph. (Szarkowski,

2002).

When one goes on holiday to Machu Pichu or to the Taj Mahal, one sees something so grand and

impressive that they can never be satisfied with the translation of what they saw on to a

photographic print. It almost isn't useful to photograph these things. Not in the same way. This is

not what the art of photography should be about. Art photography should be used to transform

things, beautify things.

So from my perspective, England is full of things that look terrible or banal (are interesting subjects

for photographs). It took a few years for what was happening in America to effect the photographers

operating in the UK. When they did receive the knowledge of Eggleston, Shore, Sternfeld and

Meyerowitz, they took it and put their very English aesthetic on it.

We start with Paul Reas and his book 'I can help'. As a reaction to Don Mcullin inaccurate

representation of Reas' home town of Bradford Reas decided that he would take up photography

and treat things truthfully. After studying at Newport photography school Reas went out and made I

can help. A tutor at his school was Martin Parr and here he discovered colour photography. I can

help is a product of hanging around shopping centres and super markets making. These places

would seem the worst place to find anything nice to photograph. The modern equivalent would be

photographing in Westfield in London, or the Trafford centre in Manchester. The photographs that

came out of these trips that were published in 'I can help' are stimulating, exciting, very interesting

and probably a whole lot more pleasing than the scene he captured would have looked like in

person. The methods Reas applied in creating these photographs are not theorised in photography

schools in England. While a great part of the achieving of something like I can help is mostly about

going out and getting it some kind of critical understanding of this type of practice would only be

beneficial to young English photographers. Those who wanted to take up or absorb such practices

into that style would have an individual brand quite English. Something that could be located ina

tradition and which could stand out from the crowd of photographers who are trying to follow the

German school of photography in many ways.

Reas' work essentially turned social documentary into art. Removing the empathy from the situation

and presenting modern art photographs with a political statement. A purer form of this work is

Martin Parr's work. He is, as Eggleston was, documenting 'life today'. (Parr, 2009) His practice is

only concerned with compositional problems and national identity. 'The last resort' sums up this

objective social documentary perspective. I do not think Parr judges the people he photographs as

some would say, and certainly the photographs don't actually cause you to judge. For me the images

are fascinating, the look of the textures, their colour and finish rendered under the ring flash.

Above all English photographers I think should be better recognised is Nigel Shafran. His work is

perhaps the perfect embodiment of the everyday practice. There's no grandeur in his photographs,

each subject is unassuming and challenging in terms of worthiness as subject of a photograph. Tate

Britain showed his work in their 'How we are' Exhibit and describe his work as 'still life details of

everyday living-scenarios' (Williams, 2007). He likes to photograph the ordinary. His ongoing

exploration into 'Ordinary London' being a simulation of his work.

The interest in them, apart from as pieces of art, is as historical document. The simple pleasure of

looking at what life looked like he says in an interview with Paul Elliman he says 'I'd love to see

washing up from Tudor Times'. 'Pictures of washing up are funny'. (Elliman, 2000) Shafran has the

audacity to photograph such common objects. They are so simple and unassuming it's fantastic.

Shafran is the master of this movement because his work is all essentially taken within the few

miles of his house in which he must operate. He does not go anywhere new onlu dealing with 'the

familiar' in his work. One thing about Shafran is that he looks at his incredibly ordinary scenes with

such a meaningful state. Through the ground glass of his 54 camera. This does make it harder to

separate from a normal view of the scene than in say Eggleston's work where it is transformed by

the 35mm colour film. The large format is realistic and therefore has a very strong indexical link

with the scene it captured. It is different from 35mm in that It just looks quite lainly real. The

symbol is more like the sign in 54. SO I think in terms of the scene being transformed it is more so

in Eggleston's pictures than Shafran's.

Britain is a small island and England, being only part of the island, is even smaller than it. It's land

has been settled for thousands of years. Man has cultivated it for almost as long, and yet our effect

on the land is relatively subtle. There aren't any grand vistas in which you see the awesome power

of man and nature collide, in fact the natural landscape in England isn't terribly awesome. It is very

green, almost exclusively green, and it is very rarely anything but gentle. It is quaint and so too is

our impact on it. With the exception of the lake district, every beauty spot is incredibly smooth. The

South Downs, the Yorkshire Dales, even the coast line cliffs undulate apparently peacefully. It isn't

that there isn't anything happening that one could photograph, it's just that it's not immediately

obvious.

There have been a few photographers who have photographed the British landscape, of course there

are many enthusiasts, but few professional photographers pursue it. The most prominent of those I

can think of are Simon Roberts and Jem Southam who I will take as my examples. Jem Southam

has done something very interesting, and Aaron Schuman addresses this subject with Southam in an

interview for SeeSaw magazine. Schuman comments that the photographic approach that Southam

has decided to take '4x5" colour film' is usually used and associated with 'very grand, dramatic and

what have often been described as 'sublime' environments.' Southam's subject, The English

countryside, is 'quite a gentle landscape'. The interesting things about it are not necessarily obvious,

and it is a skill to find a gripping composition here. Southam likes the contrast of 'the subtle scale

and history' of the English landscape with the 'epic story to be told, which exists wherever humans

have made their homes.' The layers are there, but they are subtle. It is more satisfying to pick them

out.

The subtlety of our natural landscape should make it interesting. Art work should have layers of

comprehension, I think these such layers are actually very easily located in England. We see the

technique used by Paul Graham in 'Troubled Land' photographed in Ireland. The picture is of a

roundabout in a town. It's quite uninteresting, but is somehow pleasing. The composition is good

and the colours are nice. It seems to be a fairly standard town survey shot, and then we spot people

within the scene they are running to the right of the image and they are dressed in army uniform and

slacks, suddenly the image shows its significance. This example is from Ireland but by a British

photographer, Paul Reas does the same in England itself with his 'I can help' book. Here we see

photographs of supermarkets which seem mundane until you realise what you are viewing is a wash

of consumer slogans and that the image really critiques consumer capitalism.

Photographs like 'Dew Pond, Ditchling Beacon, Sussex 1999' illustrate the approach that Southam

spoke about in this interview. You have a rolling landscape very soft and calm, lightly saturated

colours, and a pond in the foreground. It could simply be a body of water but it is very round and

has a hint of being artificial. Still there is a question of why it is there, and what the hell a dew pond

is, and the photograph itself is very pleasing on the eye.

Because England is a small island, everything on it is on a very small scale. There are no

mountains, technically we have only hills, where the United States has the Grand Canyon, we have

the Cheddar Gorge, which is really nothing special. Despite the relative lack of anything to

photograph, there are some photographers that try to tackle the English landscape, contemporary

examples being Jem Southam and Simon Roberts. Artists like these two have a job on their hands

making something spectacular out of something which really isn't. Or perhaps to comment on the

fact that it isn't.

One criticism of Roberts' work is as follows: Roberts makes large prints from large format

photographs. Printing things big usually has the effect of giving whatever the photograph is of or

the photograph itself more power. Ed Burtynynsky's photographs about oil use the same idea. Ed

worked on that project in the United States, a country where you will see an 100 sq/mile oil field. In

England you will not see this. We no longer have an industry, Maggie Thathcher closed the mines

and factories and turned us into a country of consumers instead of producers. The largest

employment sectors in England are in Health, Retail, Finance, Admin and Service sectors. This will

come in later when we address the strongest photography work that has been made in England, but

for now it just serves as a demonstration of how our landscape is not for industry. It is for leisure...

and a tiny bit of farming.

After christmas I visited the Royal Academy to see the work of Constable, Turner and

Gainsborough in a modest exhibition of their work from the Academies own collection, (they were

all resident artists there). I had gone to the exhibition to try to find out a bit more about England and

in particular that romantic, pastoral England that I have read and seen so much of. I am in love with

this England, it is beautiful, awe inspiring and rugged. the rivers Wye and Stour were enchanting

and the painters in question made the English landscape look fierce and archaic. Sublime in the

definition that Coleridge would adopt, that which is beyond the control of man, unrestrained. It feels

mythical, like Arcadia.

It is often said that artists and poets in the romantic period were very found of opiates. I have good

reason to believe that this is true because shortly after the exhibition I visited East Anglia, Suffolk

and Norfolk on separate occasions, and I have to say what I saw, what they saw and what they 'saw'

are terrificly different things. Now of course I am not being so ignorant as to insult the Romantics

because they didn't capture what they saw in front of them. I 'saw' what they 'saw'. But it is

interesting when you bring photography into the equation. Painters have a certain amount more

artistic license than photographers do, and certainly photographers of a certain breed would not

manipulate their images out of recognition of the original scene (they like the indexical link) so

what they capture was certainly in some way there. There is no play of depth or position or scale.

You can't really do that with photography. In painting on the other hand, you can play with

foreground and background scale, you can reposition things and it is quite alright, you can also

rough up the smooth edges of our landscape. I think this may be the reason why the large majority

of photographers coming out of England do not photograph landscape. Good, sensible

photographers have normally moved into other fields such as fashion, advertising, portraiture, and

into different environments like the London or actually a lot of the time quite out of this country, or

to Scotland where if you like landscape you can actually find some rugged stuff a little close to

home. I put it to you that creating landscape photographs in England is too difficult for most,

Southam and Roberts have taken on an incredibly difficult task in the English landscape. Southam

has managed to find views and angles within those views that are powerful, where Roberts creates

interest by creating contemporary documents of our interaction with our landscape. Roberts avoids

the problem of nature by focusing on man's interaction with it.

The photographers of the 1980s in England were given quite a gift. Something very new. The

English landscape had become interesting, rugged and was turbulent. Not the physcial landscape,

but the political landscape. Driven by Margaret Thatcher and a great American influence from

Reagan, Thatcher destroyed collectivism, privatised our services and dismantled our industry to

create a new economy and with it a new group of individualistic consumers. The country was

highly capitalist and consumerism was heavily promoted. An emphasis on things, material

possessions, became apparent. At this time photographers like Martin Parr, Paul Reas and Anna Fox

started working in colour, a medium which a decade ago was the sole property of the advertising

industry, was the 'fitting' medium to reflect the bright and colourful, American England. The

photographs made commented on the new culture, not necessarily having a protest statement, but

certainly by using the bright new colourful film, often with flash, they were satirising consumer

culture. 'I can help' by Reas is overtly political. There is an urgency in the manner in which he

points his finger at society. The pictures are funny, but they are slightly worrying. Again these

completely neutral, mundane spaces like the supermarket, are transformed by photography into

something wonderfully interesting.

To understand why the photographers thought about photographing here, you must look at their

influences. The largest two are William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. The colour work of American

photographers like these was of the most banal subjects imaginable. The British photographers saw

this use of colour and thought they could use it in their own way. The Eggleston prints are all

beautiful, the English ones are not pretty in the traditional sense, the english palette not being quite

so nice, but the images are as visually interesting and that's partly because of the fact that they are

gross. They seem dirty, very bright but dull at the same time, and the flash washes the colour out a

little - it is anti aesthetic.

Even with rich photographic talent and lots of interesting subjects, England is a very unpopular

photographic location. I put this down to a number of factors. We are just so so in so many areas:

culture, climate, our cities and nature. Also, most photographers and artists that live here don't paint

the environment. Living somewhere too long for most people sucks away interest and creative

potential. Also, traditionally we have not been at the forefront of art photography. These days we are

not looked to as a nation of greats. America is the front runner and we are lost in the mix with

germany and such like.

I think that the 80s was a high point for british photography because of the political landscape of the

country. In the late 90s and in this century the political parties have moved toward the middle, there

are less spectacles and less challenging subjects in the domestic news. Our politics has become like

our nature, subtle and smooth. This level of banality creates a real challenge and some less obvious

thinking. I have been wondering about it and perhaps the English landscape is a good subject and is

starting to be very well covered photographically. This is true if we talk about the landscape of

offices, towns, suburbs, shopping precincts. There are the new battlegrounds of photographic art.

When one steps out of their car at Ashford outlet centre, they have before them the new British

Landscape.

The traditional English countryside is maybe too subtle for traditional photographic survey. But

maybe it is better for this exact reason. I have it that the American landscape offers it on a plate.

You don't need to think very much to see the point of the photographs here. To read what they say

takes a second. In England you unlock a great cultural tapestry on every photographic plate.

Ultimately, this essay has been a tool to express the merits of English photography. I believe that

this country has a lot of subject matter that could become the content of great photography work.

James O Jenkins in his book 'United Kingdom' says that “we might be a small island, but we are an

interesting one.” (Jenkins, 2012) Photographically we are, and there is lots of good work being

produced. The skill of the photographers working in the style of Shafran or Fox put them at the

forefront of photographic art. I believe they should be recognised as such.

Bibliography

Roberts S. and Daniels S. (2009). We English. London: Chris Boot.

Parr M. (2009). The last resort. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing.

O Jenkins J. (2012). United Kingdom. London: Black Box Press.

Elliman P. (2000). Interview with Paul Elliman, Fig-1. URL:

http://www.nigelshafran.com/pages/texts_pages/002texts.html

Reas P. (1988). I can help. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications

Williams V. (2007) How we are: Photographing Britain London: Tate Publishing

BBC. (2009). The genius of photography. DVD

Eggleston W. William Eggleston's guide. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Reference Images

Dew Pond, Ditchling Beacon, Sussex, 1999 4th January 2000. Three bean soup, cauliflower vegetable cheese. Morning coffee and croissants.