Collective Photography

Collective Photography was going to be a book about what it means to take groups of people on walks where they take photographs together.

I decided to write a book because when you’re trying to get your head around a lot of complex ideas, deciding to write a book seems like a really good idea at the time. It turns out it’s not such a good idea and this is not that book, but it is a nice collection of some of my thoughts in that area.

What it actually winds up being about is my becoming an artist over 12 months through understanding what it means to take groups of people on walks where they take photographs together.

Slow Down

“Your tours have now made me unable to walk at ignorant speed. Looking at detail is slowing me down, but bringing me joy!” – Fran, Photo School walker

Every month, from 2012 onwards, I would take groups of people, between five and twenty, with cameras, on a walk through an area of Birmingham. I’d lead them on a relatively short route at a very slow pace, usually covering a mile in 90 minutes. I’d point at things and the people would take photos of them, or they’d take photos of other things. I’d call it a Photo Walk.

The current run of Photo Walks started as a bit of promotion for the Photo School classes I was running at the time with Matt Murtagh. The classes would start with an hour indoors setting the theme for the day (the street photography of Cartier-Bresson, for example) followed by a two-hour workshop in the streets of Birmingham, tied up with a two-hour session reviewing everyone’s photos as a group on the big screen. Since photography teaching is a relatively busy field we thought extracting the middle bit and running it on its own with no bookends would be a good sampler of our style.

Photo Walks aren’t new, though. We were adapting something we’d been involved with for a number of years.

Flickrmeets

In 2004 the photo-sharing website Flickr was launched. It was fairly popular with bloggers and, as a blogger who took photos for my blog, I signed up for an account. Flickr was interesting because the photos you uploaded could be made discoverable by putting them in groups or by adding tags to them. A photograph of, say, Birmingham Town Hall would be tagged birmingham, town hall, building, victorian, victoria square, pillars and might be included in the Birmingham, Buildings of Britain and Victorian Architecture groups. People who checked those tags or groups might look at your photo and leave a comment or mark it as a favourite. These things seem mundane to us now but they were pretty revolutionary back then.

Flickr groups emerged in the same way Wikipedia entries are created - someone noticed there wasn’t one for a particular subject so they set it up. The Birmingham group was set up in this way and while nothing was really done to promote it a bunch of us gravitated towards it, adding our photos of the city and slowly making connections. As well as the pool of photos, each group has a discussion board and, naturally, we started chatting about the city we all called home. In September 2005 I posted an idea under the subject “Outing”:

How about an outing?

I’ve been thinking that I could do with some motivation for going to places in Birmingham to take photos and this struck me as an idea.

We agree on a place and a time somewhere in the city, meet up there and go take photos. Say somewhere in Digbeth at 2pm on Sunday, that kind of thing.

Then, after an hour or two of photography, we retire to the pub for a bit.

Anyone up for this?

Three people turned up and we went on a walk through Digbeth taking photos. It wasn’t a roaring success but we enjoyed ourselves and that’s all that mattered.

Come the Spring I put out another suggestion to the Birmingham group and this time the group responded with more interest. We agreed to meet in the Jewellery Quarter this time and do our walk-and-shoot around there. Twelve people turned up and 249 photos were uploaded in the days after. None of these people had met before this day and it was a bit awkward at first, matching up screen-names with real names. Some of these people became good friends, some drifted away, but the Birmingham Flickrmeets, as we called them, still happen every month to this day. While I’m no longer involved it’s one of the things that I’m pretty proud of.

The same is not the same

The Flickrmeets were important to me for a number of reasons, but the relevant one here was the notion of photographing as a group. Photography is a solitary experience. The photographer literally puts blinkers on, shuts out the peripheral world, and directs their attention to the rectangle in the viewfinder. It is not an activity that lends itself to collaboration. Even when two photographers work together on a shoot, one will be the assistant, serving the vision of the capital-P Photographer.

So while the Flickrmeets were social occasions, we took our photos on our own. We might notice what others were shooting and be inspired to look that way too, but the act of clicking the shutter was a personal one. That is, until we put them on the Internet.

The notion of a photo pool, or photo tag, is quite interesting as the authorship of the photograph is in some way diminished by the whole. Those 249 Flickrmeet photos comprise a work in and of themselves, created by a group. We were not thinking along those lines but the collaboration is pretty clear to me. It really comes out when you spot the same subjects being shot by different eyes. Each photo was so very different, finding angles and approaches that others hadn’t noticed. For someone keen to learn from their peers, this was a revelation.

“I don’t like photographing things other people have photographed. It’s like they’ve been done already.”

A student in a Photo School class

A photograph isn’t a just a record of a thing. It’s the creative act of capturing reflected light where decisions are constrained by the environment. Those decisions are personal to the photographer and make the photo, no matter how mundane, theirs alone. How those decisions are reached is what makes the act of photography so interesting. Because you cannot be that person at that place at that time with that frame of mind it is impossible for you to take the same photo. But you can learn from them.

On the Jewellery Quarter Flickrmeet we were collectively attracted to a yellow-painted brick wall. Everyone submitted at least one photo of the wall to the group. The different ways each person interpreted that wall fascinated me. And these weren’t “artists” - most of them wouldn’t have called themselves “photographers” even. The price of decent digital cameras had recently dropped to affordable levels and these were just people, some students, some professionals, some young, some middle aged. And together they created a thing.

Productising the photo meetup

Groups of photographers have been meeting up and going on walks together for as long as cameras have been portable, so there was nothing special in the Flickrmeet. Still, as Matt and I were developing Photo School it felt like we could do something with this model, even if it was just to promote our classes.

We ran our first photo walk during the Still Walking festival as a free fringe event, leading people through our favourite spots in Digbeth and showing them how to take pictures of them. It was booked out and was a success so I scheduled a walk each month developing three routes through Digbeth. Meanwhile Matt started developing a route under and around Spaghetti Junction, where he had grown up, and we ran that every few months as an afternoon excursion. And then, in the winter, we ran tripod walks through the city centre, giving people a chance to take long exposures at night in relative safety.

The walks quickly became an important part of the Photo School offer, even if they didn’t bring in that much money. People liked the chance to be in a group and go to places they wouldn’t normally go. But they also liked the slowness of the exercise and the chance to be a photographer, something their non-photographer friends would find annoying.

Anatomy of a walk

After I’d exploited the Flickrmeets for my own financial benefit, like a parent might send their child to the workhouse, I started to notice they might have been even more interesting that I’d previously imagined. They break down into roughly these areas of interest.

Photography class. The walks provide an opportunity to “be a photographer” and practice the act of taking photographs. I run mini exercises in seeing, composing and thinking about photography. It’s very loose and unstructured but people do learn stuff.

Guided Tour. I am a tour guide, taking people into unfamiliar territories and framing their experience along a prescribed route. The power and authority I have over the group, and their implicit trust in me, is quite surprising. By effectively playing a recognisable role and following an archetypal template I am able to make the participants see the world through my eyes, or at least see my framework as the dominant one to be respected or rejected.

Narratives and histories. I describe my walks as containing “a bucket of local history, hidden knowledge and unsubstantiated myth”. We stop at key points of photographic interest where I tell stories, some drawn from reputable sources, some half-remembered pub tales. If we have someone who knows more than me I invite them to share, something they’re often happy to do. The walkers come away not just with new knowledge but with a tangible sense of place.

Social activity. Early on it was pointed out to me that the walks provide a valuable social function. They give people a chance to meet in a non-threatening, low-pressure setting. I get a lot of single people who are new to the city or just looking for something to do on a weekend that doesn’t require a date. Thanks to the photography, people are able to stay quiet and keep to themselves, if they want, whilst benefitting from being in the group, but there is also ample time for socialising. I don’t share contact details but those who put their photos in the Flickr group can get in touch through there.

My artistic practice. Alongside enabling the above I am also doing something for myself. The walks tap into lots of the things that interest me as an artist: collective photography, ubiquitous cameras, photography as performance, and above all the creative engagement with the world mediated by technology. Seeing the walk as an artwork in itself helps me to process and develop my thoughts around these areas, and it’s something I want to explore a bit more in the next chapter.

Photo Walks As Art

Walking On

The idea that walking can be an artform struck me as a really weird one. Most mediums in which art is formed - singing, poetry, dance, painting - tend to be distanced somewhat from everyday activities, but walking is walking, right? How can going for a walk, the most universal thing in the universe, be art?

I think I came across Art Walking first through the Still Walking festival in Birmingham where, amongst other interesting people, artists would be commissioned to do guided walks through the city. I was expecting them all to be artists who did things other than walks but for some of them the walking was the practice.

The closest I’d come to this was my friend and inspiration Nikki Pugh’s project Uncertain Eastside where she walked the periphery of the Eastside development zone with two GPS receivers and recorded the variance between them - built-up areas bounced the satellite signals around creating a larger difference in readings. To do this she walked the route again and again, taking her measurements and creating her artwork.

I had naively assumed that the walking was a means to an end. That the artwork - a poster-sized rendering - was the thing. What it took me years to realise was, for Nikki, the physical “product” was only part of the thing. The walking was an equal, if not more important, aspect, because, as I understand it anyway, that awareness, that being in the place in a mindful way, is her art practice.

The Still Walking festival coincided with my research phase and served me well by bringing a load of artist from around the world to my doorstep, so I attended them all. The ones by “walking artists” were the most fascinating because there wasn’t anything else but the walk and an informal discussion afterwards. The walk was the work and it stood alone.

By chance I heard about a touring exhibition called Walk On, surveying artists who had used walking in their work, which was due to come to Birmingham in the Spring. The exhibition catalogue, which I ordered, was a lovely thing giving each artist a blurb and sample of their work, but it left me a bit empty. Either the curators were deeply invested in art-speak (in which I am not fluent) or this “Art Walking” thing was terribly ill-defined and at best a crude way to gather otherwise disparate artists together. That’s not a bad thing as it allows for new connections to me made, but it did warn me off thinking of “Art Walking” as a coherent movement or school.

That’s not to say there aren’t artists who don’t coherently and effectively build the practice around walking - there are. But attempts to give the notion form are still nascent. And that’s a good thing.

Tour Guide meets Collective Shoot

In this context the “art-thing” for me happens at the intersection of the solitary act of photography and group act of guided walking. What do I mean by that chunk of jargon?

When I lead people on a walk it’s very obviously a performance. I have a script, both in terms of the route I plan to take and the manner in which I present that route. I have a role, that of the expert, the guide, and I play that role as a character quite similar to Pete Ashton but different enough that friends have commented on it.

The whole event is mediated by my decisions. The participants have their experience directed and informed by me. I decide what they see and inform how they see it.

There’s a view that the walk itself is the artwork. I perform for 90 minutes to a small participatory audience and then we all go home. I think this view has merit, but I don’t know if this is the “art” I’m looking for. For example, you could say teaching is an artwork. People gather in a room where the teacher performs and they leave with their worldview slightly changed. Is this fundamentally any different to seeing a play in a theatre? I don’t know, to be honest.

I do know I play the same character when I’m teaching as when I’m leading a walk, and that my ability to be “a photographer” is diminished when I’m in this role. Photography, for me, is a personal process that edges into meditative at times. I find I cannot take decent photos while I’m running a workshop or a walk because I cannot get into the right mindset. (Amusingly I have no decent photos of Curzon St Station despite telling hundreds of people how to shoot it.) So I’d be happy to go along with the notion that my taking people through this process is, in some way, a “work of art”.

But these are more than performances. They are more than classes. People are taking photographs, engaging in creative activities which have outcomes in the form of photographs. This is where I think I am being an Artist creating a Work, not as the producer of a walk but as a director of other people’s photographs.

I’ve often thought of a Photo Walk as a group of cameras attached to people over whom I exert an amount of control. I use the methodology of the tour guide to broker a situation where people are prepared to let me control their lives for a short period. As such any photographs that emerge from this process are, in some way, informed by me. I can consider the mass of photos that emerge from these walks to be “the work”. That is, if I can get hold of them.

Photography, for me, is about working with constraints. There are obvious physical constraints such as where you can place the camera. Natural constraints of light and technical constraints of the equipment used. There’s also the constraint of photography itself – the issue of thinking in terms of a rectangle of coloured dots instead of with your eyes. All these problems serve to make photography a vibrant and exciting artistic medium.

So the idea of attempting to influence a dozen or so autonomous agents in how they might take photographs and the results being “my art” is not a strange one. An important part of art, for me, is understanding when to exert control and when to just let it be. When to influence and when to not. It’s about developing an understanding of the subject and developing a relationship. My subject is the areas I lead walks in but also how those areas are perceived. Evidence of that perception is often the work.

Drones, drones, drones.

It’s interesting how the language of armed combat lends itself to photography so well and I do wonder if anyone has ever done a decent study of it. The viewfinder is similar to the scope, the we talk of shoots, of capturing moments. The whole methodology of the Decisive Moment, where a photographer finds a scene and waits for something interesting to happen in it, is not that different to a sniper in a hide, waiting for the target to appear. The camera itself, especially the phallic appearance of the SLR body with a long lens, looks like a gun. The moment of releasing the shutter is, I’d imagine, not dissimilar to to pulling the trigger on a target. To go out taking photos in the wild is, in essence, a hunt.

So it’s not too weird a stretch that I’ve started to think of myself as a drone commander. These are the folks who sit in an army base in front of multiple screens directing aerial drones around the Middle East, shooting video and shooting missiles as appropriate. What’s interesting about the drones is they are semi-autonomous. As well as explicit instructions they are also given a remit, commands to execute depending on the circumstances. If you sense certain radio signals send an alert. If you’re over an area we haven’t scanned in a week perform a scan. Rather like a Roomba working its way around your carpet, drones are given a framework and operate autonomously within that framework. They are programmed.

When I take people on a photo walk I program them. I place them in a new environment which I carefully contextualise from the outset. I direct their route, aiming them at key targets along the way and directing them in how to photograph those targets. Along the way I encourage them to select their own secondary targets, following the programme of “being a photographer” within the context I set.

This is not to diminish the role of the walkers. It’s just a way of showing how they hand over some control to me while maintaining significant autonomy. They are guided.

Planning some new walks.

After a year or so of running walks, and with the growing realisation that they were much more interesting in this form that I’d initially thought, I decided to investigate the form further. I applied for an Art Council Grant For The Arts to cover a range of artistic development that would result in a series of new walks in Digbeth titled Photographic Exploration Of Place.

I was awarded the grant, which was fantastic, so now I needed to deliver the walks.

That moment when something theoretical suddenly becomes real is quite a strange one. Because there was a very good chance I wouldn’t get the grant - it was my first application and there have been dramatic cuts in arts funding across the board - I’d been acting as if I wouldn’t get it. At best they’d suggest I resubmit with modifications and that would mean another couple of months of waiting. So I assumed the worst and lined up some work for the rest of the year.

When the yes came through it took a while to adjust to this new reality. My hopes, which I hadn’t gotten up, were now realised. I now had to devise and deliver these walks.

So where to start?

If Wet

Sound had been on my mind a lot that year. I’d been going to If Wet, a monthly meetup of sound artists and experimental musicians in a village hall in Worcestershire. Initially I went to support my friend Sam Underwood, who runs it with David Morton, and to take photos, but it has very quickly become an important part of my creative life.

At If Wet the musicians or artists present their work to their peers in a relatively informal setting. There are performances but they are accompanied by explanation of the ideas and techniques involved. A lot of the time they’re addressing issues that arrive at the frontiers of music making, sharing their discoveries and asking for advice.

While I have a musical family and can hold a note I’m not a trained musician and certainly not a peer of the people at If Wet, so I treat it slightly differently. Whenever they talk about sound, I think about light and how a photographer works with light. Recording sounds = recording light. Manipulating sound = manipulating light. Performing sound = performing light. And so on.

It doesn’t always work and sometimes it takes me down a dead end, but as a mental exercise it’s a great way of getting out of the photographer mindset.

One of the ideas I got from If Wet came from Kathy Hinde who describes herself as “an audio-visual artist” and whose talk was effectively an informal version of this one for NESTA where she talks about “open scores”. The idea of writing a score for photographers, in the same way one might write a score for musicians, was very interesting. It tapped nicely into my musing about group photography and this idea of restricting the photographer.

Being a good photographer seems, to me, to involve understanding the limitations and working with them, not against them. Having the wisdom to know that it is impossible to replicate reality on a flat rectangle and, instead, to treat these limitations as possibilities. To understand that, to quote Garry Winogrand, “photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.”

So how would the world look photographed if the photographer was given a score? And who would be the author of those photographs? Those are the sort of questions If Wet prompted in me.

Active Listening

During the photography workshop I ran for the Ikon Gallery during their Shimabuku exhibition I became aware how a dramatic change in the sensory environment can affect people’s photographs. We started in Brindley Place around the cafes and pedestrianised squares before crossing Broad Street to the canals of Gas Street Basin. On Broad Street, a busy main road into the city filled with bars and noise, people’s photos become agitated and rushed. Then, when we got onto the canals, the peace and calm also dramatically informed their shots. This was not unexpected but it was nice to have a good example of how the environment changing the mood can inform the photographs.

The SoundKitchen collective of musicians/sound artists ran one of the walks for Still Walking that autumn around Edgbaston Reservoir where they asked walkers to engage in “active” and “augmented” listening to “experience the environment from differing sonic perspectives”. I found this exercise fascinating as it mirrored some of the things I ask people to do on photo walks, only with their eyes instead of their ears, and gave me a route to build on the lessons learned at If Wet.

In short, could I use the techniques SoundKitchen were using to change peoples’ mood to make them see their environment differently? And could that change be seen in their resulting photographs?

Theories of Space

The nature of a photo walk is that it is a journey through a place, and so understanding what traveling through place means felt important. To this end I decided to research how places can be explored, specifically the vague and ill-defined school of Psychogeography.

I put out a call on Twitter to see if any of my theory-infused art-friends would be interested in running a Psychogeography workshop and Cathy Wade said she would be. I titled the session Practical Psychogeography Workshop - Walking the City in Curious Ways and we ran it on September 16th at the A3 Project Space in Digbeth where Cathy is a curator. Here’s the blurb:

Psychogeography is one of “those” terms. Annoyingly undefined and often rejected by the very people associated with it, it refuses to go away, cropping up whenever the relationship between people and place is pondered.

The literature of Psychogeography can seem willfully obscure. Many have eagerly opened an Iain Sinclair book only to retire crying in defeat, and what was Stewart Home on about exactly? Then there’s the French and all that Flaneurism with tortoises and revolution. Seems like a lot of fuss to make about going for a nice walk.

During this workshop we’ll look at some of the key ideas that make up Psychogeography, from Enlightenment London through 19th Century Paris and the 60s Situationalists to the recent Millennial musings of Iain Sinclair, Will Self, Stewart Home and Bill Drummond.

There’s a lot of ideas in there so having stroked our chins for a bit we’ll quickly dive into the practical side of things, chopping up maps, scribbling on the walls and dreaming up new ways of navigating the city. And then we’ll get out into the streets and put these ideas to the test. Finally we’ll return to base for food and to talk about what just happened and make plans for the future.

As befits the subject matter the aims of this workshop are deliberately loose but we hope you’ll come away with the following:

• A deeper understanding of where Psychogeography came from and what it might be useful for.

• New ways of looking and appreciating the city you live and work in.

• An inability not to notice the curious.

• The warm glow of a fun evening well spent.

We had six attendees and after Cathy went through the history and theories of psyshogeography we dove into the practice, chopping up and scribbling on maps with the intention of using them later on walks guided by the rules established. One pair had found a route by hanging pens from metal “dousing rods” over a map to see what they drew. This took them to the middle of a roundabout on the ring road. Another pair rolled dice at every corner to - 1-3 for left, 4-6 for right - to see where change would take them. Finally the third pair cut out shapes from the maps and rearranged them to make a new map, then tried to follow it.

The end result was spectacularly inconclusive, not too surprising given the nature and breadth of the subject matter, and I left with no idea if the event had been a success or a failure. People seemed to enjoy it, for sure, but it was probably the first indication that I might have bitten off more than I could chew with this project.

Bringing it together

So, running a couple of months behind my original schedule, I started planning the “deliverables” - the walks that would form the culmination of this period of funded activity. The one constant that had stuck with me through this process was that I was interested in how an experience of a place can inform a person’s impression of that place, and how those experiences can be mediated by experiencing or practicing art.

Sound continued to play an important part in my thinking. When we’re navigating a space, sight and hearing are the primary senses used, though they do work in very different ways. What people saw would obviously inform their photographs but what about what they heard? How could I affect that?

I decided to work with people I’d consider peers in the world of sound art. SoundKitchen were an obvious choice after their walk around Edgbaston Reservoir and were up for collaborating on two walks, while Sam Underwood would enable me to bring the ideas fermented at If Wet directly into a walk. A fourth walk would be run by me alone, but in the end the weather prevented me from doing this. The missing fourth walk would finally manifest itself in July 2014.

The Walks.

Some of the photos taken by participants on these walks, along with audio and documentary photographs, can be downloaded from art-pete.com/collectivephotography.

Walk 1 - Guided Listening with Iain Armstrong of Soundkitchen.

The preparation for this walk involved myself and Annie Mahtani walking around Digbeth looking for locations that had both interesting sights and sounds. We decided to start outside Curzon Street Station next to Millennium Point, moving to the middle of the field next to Eastside Park for some distance listening/looking. Next we stopped under a railway bridge taking trains in to New St Station before walking to the Latif’s car park next to the Birmingham Dogs Home. Finally we explored the massive brick railway viaduct at Allison Street before meandering down to the bustle of the Custard Factory.

On the day, Iain Armstrong lead the listening exercises, effectively tuning people’s perception of the environment through their ears. He used different techniques for each section which I tried to translate into photographic techniques. So when he asked people to listen to distant sounds I got them to look for distant subjects. When he got them to hear movement I asked them to photograph movement. The instructions were simple, giving people freedom to interpret them loosely, and the resulting photographs were very interesting.

Walk 2 - Micro-listening with Sam Underwood

Sam’s walk was theoretically similar to Ian’s but had a distinctly different remit. While Iain had very much been exploring the landscape I wanted Sam to help people explore the details. Sam brought a van-load of tools - contact microphones, stethoscopes, hydrophones, amplifiers and headphones - so people could hear the small sounds that echo through the fabric of Digbeth. I wanted to relate this to close-up and abstract photography where the photographer gets in close and reveals aspects of a place not obvious to the casual eye.

We started under the arches at the Custard Factory with a quick demo of Sam’s Sonic Graffiti project embedded in the brickwork before embarking on possibly the slowest walk I’ve ever run. It was more a meander and we barely covered 200 yards in the first hour before I stopped the listening and jumped us forwards to the canal. People were really exploring their environment with the listening devices, seeing what otherwise familiar objects sounded like and discovering these new worlds.

How this effected people’s photographs is uncertain. At the very least the process of following sounds lead them to places and subjects they might not have found with their eyes alone. Thinking “what will this sound like” before switching to “how can I make a photograph of this” is a novel route, to be sure. But the resulting photos felt to be more documentary than works in themselves. “Here is a photo of something that sounded interesting.” Unlike Ian’s Soundkitchen walk, where the listening and seeing felt nicely balanced, this felt more like a listening workshop with a bit of photography tagged on.

Walk 3 - Soundtracked walk by Annie Mahtani of Soundkitchen.

The third walk was organised with Annie of Soundkitchen though I lead it on my own. She had prepared a 60 minute soundtrack which I asked participants to listen to at the same time as we walked together along a predefined route.

Annie’s soundtrack was built up from field recordings made in Birmingham, meaning it was often hard to tell what was a natural sound and what was coming through the headphones. This did make for occasional discombobulation when sounds emerged in the “wrong” places (traffic on the canal, for example) but the effect was possibly too subtle for the participants to notice any change in their moods.

Also, given the purpose of the soundtrack was to alter their framework from the norm, having a walk that took people to places they wouldn’t normally go (the backstreets and canals around a busy dual-carriageway ring-road) meant the base-line of “normal” was already a bit odd. It might have been better to do this in a more familiar environment like a shopping centre or family park.

My original plan was to take the photos and sync them up with the soundtrack, creating a new artwork from people’s photos but I couldn’t make it work effectively so I abandoned it. Of all the walks this was probably the most difficult to deal with as an artwork and thus taught me the most lessons.

Aftermath

Once I’d completed the walks I really didn’t know what to think and, to be honest, put the whole thing on hold for a couple of months. They hadn’t turned out how I’d anticipated and while that was a great thing it did leave me slightly confused. But I did have some immediate thoughts.

A good audience is hard to find

The thing that hit me was how hard it had been to get “normal” people to come on these walks. I’d assumed that by selling them through Photo School, where I had 500-odd newsletter subscribers, I’d be able to get a nice group of 10 or so people from a broad demographic. In the end I had to invite peers and friends along to make up the numbers, which radically changed the dynamics.

This felt like the biggest failure on my part. In my funding application I wrote

My photography teaching, through search engine placement, reaches a gender and ethnically diverse group with ages ranging from 15 to 70. Many do not consider themselves to be engaging in “art”. This as my base audience.

One thing I’ve noticed about Art events in Birmingham is they tend to have the same faces on them. Getting out of the Art bubble is hard and I felt with Photo School I’d managed to break through that in a small way. But one of the criteria I picked up from the Arts Council was that participants should be aware they’re involved in Art, so I put that up front and clear. I think this was a mistake.

For whatever reasons, “Art” is a turnoff to most people. I don’t pretend to have any explanations as to why but it definitely felt like switching from Photo Walks to Art Walks was a massive barrier, and since I wanted photos from as wide a range of people as possible, being restricted to my bubble of friends and acquaintances was a problem.

I tried to fix this with the series of photo walks I ran in Spring 2014, promoting them as photo walks with the artistic content hidden from view but again getting attendees was hard.

Of course it could be that my walks were just unappealing and didn’t meet the needs of the audience. The photo walks are part of an educational offer, helping people learn how to use their cameras. Anything more than that is a bonus and often comes as a surprise. Pushing the bonus while ignoring the need is, in retrospect, a massive mistake.

Like most good lessons, this one didn’t offer up answers so much as raise bigger questions about audiences and participation which I don’t think I’ll even being to understand for a good while. Suffice to say it was a humbling experience.

The walk is the thing

One of the biggest blocks I had to overcome was being able to see the walk as the artwork in and of itself. Even when I’d accepted that other people could do walks and call them artworks I still felt the need to have these walks be a means to an end.

For each of the walks I had a follow-up artwork in mind. For the first I wanted to use the field recordings made during the walk to accompany people’s photos. With the second I actually didn’t have a coherent idea but hoped something would emerge. With the third I wanted to use the timestamps on people’s photos to sync them with the soundtrack they’d been listening to.

When it came to do these, though, they didn’t seem worth it. I did some trial runs but they were rubbish - uninteresting and not up to whatever standard of “art” I might apply. They were merely photos displayed with sound.

A few months later I was thinking about Hamish Fulton’s work and revisited a documentary film of Group Walk which he did in Birmingham for Ikon and the Fierce Festival in 2012. I love that film, but it suddenly occurred to me that the film was not by Hamish Fulton and did not represent his artwork. It was by Chris Keenan, an artist in his own right, who had used Fulton’s work as raw material. The two things are connected but very separate in their execution.

I was thinking that I needed the equivalent of Keenan’s film. Unfortunately I’m not Chris Keenan. But more importantly, the walks don’t need outcomes. They are outcomes.

The Next Six Months

The original plan was to produce an online “exhibition” for the walks (I never wanted to do an actual physical exhibition preferring something virtual and mobile-friendly) and get the evaluation all tied up by Christmas. That didn’t happen. This book is effectively the exhibition and I’m happy about that. Now, eight months after the walks I think I’m finally ready to tie a knot in it.

Going right back to the beginning, the driving reason I decided to apply for a Grant For The Arts was, simply put, to turn me into a proper Artist. After Karen Newman agreed to be my mentor we sat down in the in a Digbeth pub and I talked at her for an hour about all the things I’d done which I thought were art, might have been art, and definitely weren’t art but which I enjoyed doing. Karen soaked it all up and, half-seriously, wrote some Art-Speak blurb for me. Here’s what she wrote:

Pete Ashton’s work explores the collapse of time and space in the digital age. He uses a range of media, including photography, animation, the Internet, performance and low-fi materials, creating interventions in real and virtual spaces that challenge us to look closer, calling to question the very experience of seeing in today’s media saturated world.

Performative gestures underly Ashton’s investigations of time and space. He sets rules and parameters that shape his work, such as locating every photo other than his own that has been uploaded to the Internet with the file name IMG_4228; attempting to photograph the planet Jupiter; photographing every other bus stop on the number 11 outer circle bus route in Birmingham; or making a journey to find the source of a river. This performative ethos follows through to the physical artworks, which often require the participation of the audience to complete the experience.

For an installation at Birmingham’s Central Library, for instance, Ashton invited passers by to peer through cardboard constructions to view animations on obsolete CRT computer screens. Ashton created the animations from photographs made through the difficult process of TtV, using a different viewfinder to his camera’s to photograph passers by against the backdrop of familiar architecture. Provocatively installed inside the window of the Birmingham Central Library, an iconic building of brutalist architecture on the brink of being destroyed, Ashton’s intervention into public space dealt, first and foremost, with the problem of getting local people to stop and look, and secondly, getting people to see beyond an aesthetic facade and find intrigue and delight at what lies beneath.

Key words: Seeing / looking, Experience, Consciousness, Catching people’s attention in a world of visual overload, Performance - yours in the process of making / others in the process of looking or viewing, Setting rules / Parameters / Instinct & restraint

Reading that now it seems odd to me that we decided the photo walks would be the best thing to develop as, while they are important to me, they don’t seem to have much overlap with the loose collection of activities I’d retroactively called my “art practice”. But they were the thing I felt confident in delivering. A platform I was familiar with and could develop.

One of the most important things I’ve learned about art I learned from Nikki Pugh a few years ago, though like all important things I keep needing to be reminded of it. It also crops up in the excellent Art & Fear from which I take this quote:

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.

For the artist, process trumps product. Or as Nikki would put it, the artistic practice is more important that the artworks that emerge from that practice. So, if the point of this funded period was to develop me as “an artist” both creatively and commercially then it cannot be judged purely on the artworks that I made during it. It has to be judged on some other criteria.

So let’s look at some of the more personal things from the funding application.

Increase my artistic profile

Judging the state of your profile within an ever-changing community is fraught with dangerous assumptions but while I can’t say if my profile has increased I have certainly made steps to adjust it.

Over the last year I’ve been gradually referring to myself as an Artist first and foremost. Within the arts and culture communities I’ve mostly been know as a “social media” person, thanks to the legacy of the Created in Birmingham blog, and as that sector has coalesced and industrialised out of my comfort zone I’ve been keen to change that perception. I’ve always seen online tools and communities as opportunities for creative practice rather than a new space for marketeers to exploit but the narrative of the latter has mostly won out. So one of my aims of this process was to get people to stop thinking of me as a social media and internet consultant and to start thinking of me as an artist.

I believe this has started to happen. Ikon, who I have previously worked with on a website project and a couple of photo walks through their education department, have commissioned me to run a walk this summer as an artist as part of their 50th Anniversary celebrations. I had a very constructive rejection from the Fierce Fwd artist development program and was invited to apply for the Vivid Black Hole Club.

Secure opportunities to create new work / Lay foundations for new collaborations with arts organisations

I would say I am in the process of laying foundations for creating new work but there are some significant developments. The aforementioned walk for Ikon and Still Walking was a direct result of this funded activity, developing ideas of augmented group-seeing for a walk themed around the five venues the Ikon Gallery has had over the last 50 years.

I have started a collaboration with producer Jenny Duffin developing a Camera Obscura for Birmingham. We have built a giant camera on wheels which we are taking around the region this summer to generate interest for our five year project to create bigger and better camera obscurae in the city. We plan to run workshops and events in association with arts organisations in the region exploring the fundamentals of photography and manipulating light in art. While not directly related to the subject matter of the funded activity my approach to this was definitely informed by it.

Building a solid foundation for my work

In hindsight, the word “foundation” is vaguer than I would have expected but I have seen my seemingly disparate ideas and interests start to converge into what feels like a coherent practice.

The next project, which I hope to produce with support from Vivid’s Black Hole Club and the new Birmingham Open Media laboratory, combines the following:

• Media transduction through the sonification of images.
• Photography as performance.
• Collaboration with a musician.
• Slit-scan photographic processing.
• Compression of time into a single image.
• Photographic and Musical composition.

It will also see me developing my skills in programming (either Pure Data or Processing) and hardware hacking (Arduino or Raspberry Pi) to build the equipment to my specific requirements.

A year ago I would not have been able to bridge these interests. Having now placed my artistic practice at the centre of it all, I am able to unify them with a coherent foundation.

In a way it doesn’t matter what direction my art practice moves in. I have over the last year figured out how to turn my interests into something productive and hopefully of use. The importance of this to me personally cannot be underestimated.

Make me a valuable resource for arts organisations

This is another tricky one to judge as it’s still early days and I can’t accurately say what a “valuable resource” is. At the very least my confidence as an artist can augment my workshop and teaching activities in an arts context. When working with Ikon, for example, I am no longer “just” a photography teacher, I am an artist who is able to interact with their exhibitions on that level. The work I deliver has also changed its nature somewhat, moving away from basic technical skills towards basic compositional and creative skills. Or more prosaically, from knowing how to change the aperture to knowing when to change the aperture.

Bees in a Tin

In January I applied to speak at Bees In A Tin about my work. Bees In A Tin was pitched to the world like this:

Bees in a Tin is a gathering [..] presenting a host of exciting people who make or are interested in unique interfaces for the world around them. Expect new experiences, performances, talks, artefacts, ideas (and other excellent nouns).

Contributions from some world-leading and boundary-pushing folk will range from robotics to artefact and game design, geology to make-believe, political choreography to transmedia jam, and (if you can imagine it) MUCH MUCH MORE.

Bees in a Tin will feature talks and workshops from key makers and thinkers from around the country as well as two panel sessions for audience questions (and plenty of time to chat in the breaks). If you’re interested in the spaces where the arts, science, technology, and games crash into one another, apologise, and then buy each other a drink: then this is for you.

Here’s my application:

An introduction to yourself I am an artist, photographer and photography teacher based in Birmingham, UK. I run Photo School through which I teach Beginners photography and run photography walks in Birmingham. These walks form an important part of my artistic practice.

An overview of your project I regularly take groups of people on photography walks through Birmingham, mostly Digbeth but also other areas. Using photography as a framework I get people to slow down and develop a new appreciation of their environment which they carry through to their everyday lives. Recently I have used an ACE-funded period to research and develop these walks which I’ll be relaunching in the Spring.

What you would like to do at the Bees in a Tin event I would like to use Bees on a Tin as a platform to present my findings on urban exploration mediated by photography in a group and as a goal to work towards as I continue the research and development through January and February.

My application was successful and I was given one of the half hour workshop slots. Here’s a photo of it happening My presentation was effectively a rough draft of this book asking for feedback from my peers, and the feedback was certainly useful. If nothing else it told me I was on the right track, even if I still wasn’t sure what that track was.

Post-walk walks

Since running the walks in November I’ve run a number of similar walks which have inevitably been informed by the research and development stuff. Let’s look at how a few of them worked out.

Spaghetti Junction in February was the first time I’d taken a group out since November. It’s a walk I’ve run a few times before through Photo School, exploring the paths and canals underneath the sprawling motorway junction in north Birmingham, and it was not in Digbeth so it provided a nice benchmark. It is also a very simple walk to lead, given the awesomeness of the monolithic architecture, allowing the guide freedom to relax and improvise.

Mostly the walk ran as it usually does, but at one point I realised we were right in the middle of the junction, the eye of the storm, as it were. I asked everyone to stop and put their cameras down, close their eyes and just listen to the rhythms and drones of the traffic. It was a small thing and didn’t formally flow into the rest of the walk but I think it shifted it from a pure photography expedition into something more aesthetically driven, something about appreciating our sensory environment in different ways. We were finding beauty in what many people would consider a concrete eyesore. This listening exercise helped us find music in noise pollution.

In March I ran a photo walk in Digbeth following the “classic” route around Fazeley Street. It was fun but it wasn’t interesting. It felt like a step back, in some ways. A return to what I was doing when I started thing this. I decided at that point to take a break from Digbeth and try something new.

Starting in April I scheduled eight 90 minute walks a fortnight apart. Each walk would explore a small section of the Queensway ring road that circles Birmingham’s city centre core and together they would comprise “an artwork” of some sort made up of the photos groups took on them. But each walk also stood alone as a no-pressure, fun exploration of bits of Birmingham people normally avoid or race through. I sold the walks on the Photo School website with this description:

Each walk will start in a different location on the Queensway, easily accessible by bus or train. We’ll then spend 90 minutes slowly exploring the nooks and crannies of the streets and buildings in that area, some polished and vibrant, some derelict and forgotten.

The walks build on our method of using the camera to Slow Down and Look Closer at the city we live in. And then we’ll make photos of what we see. Some will be glorious landscapes, some will be abstract close-ups. All will be of Birmingham.

Educational

The walks are informal and friendly. All cameras are welcome from phones to DLSRs to film. If you’re a total beginner or just curious about photography you will be very welcome.

We will be photographing as a group, which leads to some interesting things. Being in a group can give you confidence to try new things, to do stuff you might be embarrassed to do on your own.

Group shoots can also be educational as you see how others approach their subjects. There’s something enlightening about ten photos of the same thing by ten different people. With this in mind we’ll be asking you to share your photos with the group after each walk.

But above all you’ll be able to take photos at a slow and thoughtful pace, giving you the chance to practice your photography without boring your non-photography friends.

Artistic

As well as leading the walks Pete will use his Magic Artist Powers™ to help you see things anew. Pete has spent many years perfecting his Looking At Things™ skills and will be delighted to assist you is developing your perception receptors through his patented Finger Pointing™.

After the eight walks Pete will create a new artwork about the Queensway using the routes and, if you want to submit them, your photos. What this might look like he can’t say because he doesn’t know but it’ll help shed new light on these areas of the city and inspire others to walk these areas too.

Unique

These walks will only be run once. After the summer Pete will take the experience and move on to something else.

The first three walks went well but as summer emerged the bookings started to dwindle. Even tying in with the Birmingham Architecture Festival only brought in a couple of walkers. And I wasn’t feeling it. The idea felt forced. I was missing a point. And from a business point of view I couldn’t justify ploughing time and energy into promoting walks that weren’t resonating with my existing audience. So I scrapped them.

The cancelling was part of a wider consolidation of Stuff I Was Doing, prompted by needing to clear the decks before my wedding in July (there’s nothing like keeping a wedding on track to bring home the need for clear decks) but it did raise an interesting dilemma. The tools available to these days make it very easy to start stuff but quite hard to stop without feeling like a failure. The Queensway walks were an experiment, deliberately breaking the successful formula I’d stumbled upon in Digbeth to try something new. And they were didn’t work, but that was okay.

Art is about trying and failing and trying again, because if you play it safe then you’re not doing art. You’re making stuff to order. Which is also okay, but it’s different.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

Ikonic Places

I’d been doing a few workshops for the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, specifically with Simon Taylor, their head of education. We’d figured out a neat system where he’d take a group on a tour of the current exhibition, getting them to think about why the artist decided to make the work they did, and then I’d get the group to take photographs in that mind-set. We did this for the Shimabuku show last Summer and the Hurvin Anderson show in the Autumn and it worked really well.

This year Ikon started their 50th Anniversary celebrations and wanted to tie with Ben Waddington’s Still Walking, the festival I’d been using as a primary research tool over this period. Ben and Simon asked if I would run a walk. I, of course, said yes.

The nice thing about this was it wasn’t going to be a workshop run by me in my photography teaching capacity. This was an Artist Walk. I had, under the radar, been commission by Ikon as an artist. Which was rather nice. I’m not 100% they realise that happened.

The walk was titled Shooting Traces of Ikonic Places and was pitched to the public thus:

Starting in an octagonal kiosk in the Bullring in 1965 the Ikon Gallery has had five permanent venues in Birmingham city centre. As part of the Ikon Traces season, artist Pete Ashton asks if these locations still have residual art-power. Armed with key examples of visual art from Ikon’s history and channeling the ghosts of past venues, we will tune our eyes and look at the city through this filter. Then, with our aesthetic neurones firing, we’ll take photographs, creating new artworks from the vibrations of the old. This is a lighthearted and fun walk open to everyone with a camera and a willingness to look at the city in new ways.

The walk sold out. So we were definitely on to something!

There were three levels to my thinking. Firstly there were the locations of the first four Ikon venues, all within the city centre core. I wanted to treat these as sacred places to which we might make a pilgrimage. This is not an unusual thing as whole swathes of the heritage industry are invested in the fact that something once happened at a particular place a long time ago, even when the building itself doesn’t exist.

I wanted to play with this concept a bit, made even more futile by how Birmingham has been dramatically remade over the decades. The first Ikon was in the old Bullring shopping centre which was obliterated in 2000 making it’s exact location impossible to pin down. The second was in a since-demolished mortuary while the third was in the currently under-reconstruction shopping centre above New St Station. Only the fourth is still there on John Bright Street.

It wasn’t enough to simply stand there though. These spirits needed to be invoked. At the Bullring I stood on the point I’d decided was the location of the 1960s Ikon, an octagon kiosk, and asked the participants to stand around me and form an octagon with their arms. From the middle I then read out a list of all the artists who had exhibited there. The list was long enough to feel a bit weird but hopefully not too long to be boring. It was one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” things but it did set the tone.

We then started our walk to the next venue at the other end of New Street, but not before I’d handed out the second part of my thinking. Each person was given a pack of five colour photocopies of artworks that had been exhibited at Ikon in the 60s, 70s and 80s. They were instructed to look at a piece as if they were in the gallery. Really look at it and take it in. Then, with it imprinted in their minds, I wanted them to take photographs.

The idea here was to see if our aesthetic sensibility could be programmed, or at least mediated, by artworks. This was an explicit callback to the sound walks in November but more directly related to photography in that I’d chosen mostly visual 2D art rather than sculptures or installations.

Finally there were the photographs themselves, something that didn’t need to be explained because taking photos is an utterly normal and mundane practice. But as an artist I continue to find how people decide where to point their camera and when to press the shutter fascinating. I wanted to be sure that, from my perspective at least, the photography was on the same level of importance as the locations and the artworks.

All three formed a series of framing devices. Seeing what effect those framing devices had was the purpose of the walk.

Afterwards I found myself in another confusing state, uncertain how to judge the success or otherwise of the walk. But I think I’ve finally worked it out.

When you’re leading a group walk you ceed a lot of control over the process. You guide, but you don’t direct. With my walks I create an environment where people are free to do certain things, like walk slowly and take photos, while restricted from doing other things, like stray too far from the route. I provide stimulus but I cannot dictate its effects.

When we say “the walk is the artwork” I think we’re talking about the experience of being on that walk, in the same way people experience a play in a theatre or a band on a stage or a story in a book.

My problem has been the pesky photos people take on these walks and my desire to do something with them. It’s taken me a year to realise that the photos themselves are irrelevant. It’s the taking of the photos that matters.

That moment when someone, informed by the ideas and sensations that surround them, notices something and decides to make a picture of it with their camera.

That’s the thing.