The Photographers' Gallery

The Wall: #citizencurators: An archive of London2012
Mass Observation: This Is Your Photo
Mark Neville - Deeds Not Words
The Photographers' Gallery

Mass Observation: This is Your Photo offers an examination of the role of photography in the Mass Observation Archive. Mass Observation (MO) was founded in 1937 as a radical experiment in social science, art and documentary. Its founders aimed to create a new kind of realism in response to the economic and political conditions leading up to World War II, aiming to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ through artistic means and by collecting anecdotal evidence from people’s everyday lives and experiences. The Archive, currently held at the University of Sussex, consists of extensive written accounts of daily life, ephemera and photographs, while other works now form part of national museum collections. [...]

How does social media transform the way we record, share and ultimately remember major events?

#citizencurators is a Twitter project which documents the way Londoners responded to the Olympics of 2012. It aims to show how the contemporary history of London2012 could be recorded by the people who experienced it without the filtering of an institution.

In the project, any citizen of London could become a curator using social networking and tweet their responses in words or images with the hashtag #citizencurators. These were then collected and archived by the Museum of London.

Through this method, the project extended the idea of community participation espoused by Mass Observation and extended it into the realm of crowd sourcing and citizen journalism. On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Games, The Photographers' Gallery presents and reanimates the many photographs and tweets created by #citizencurators.

Deeds Not Words is an experimental documentary and an urgent intervention. For 18 months Mark Neville photographed the town of Corby in Northamptonshire: its people, its culture and the effects of environmental pollution that led to several babies being born with serious birth defects.

Neville followed The Corby 16 as they fought, successfully, to indict the local council for negligent disposal of waste from the town’s steel mills, which had closed in the 1980s. In 2011 Neville produced a book comprised of his photographs, scientific findings and a summary of the case. This was not for sale, but was sent to each of the 433 local authorities in the UK and to environmental agencies internationally, to raise awareness of issues around the handling of toxic waste and the reuse of contaminated land. [...]

Fish & Chips

Fish & Chips or the objectification of the body and the democratisation of everyday life. Why do in portraiture the subject-matter of an image is a recognisable or well known person? such as in, for instance, in Édouard Manet's Portraying Life, at the Royal Academy of Arts, in Man Ray's Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, or even, or, even, in Jurgen Teller's Woo!, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

The first obvious answer is in that it is more easier for curators to conceive exhibitions and develop their work when references about the subject are already available, contextualised, in opposition to those subjects, where, they have to engage in a more thorough research and level of inquire. The second answer will take us to meander in to the history of art. Art was(is) predominantly made for the elites. Being those religious and political, economical, intellectual. Paintings, tapestry and stained glass windows portraying the life of saints or narrating events taken from the Holy Book were used by religious orders and nobility until the 19th century to visually establish their 'word' or impose their territory on the common, on the non-educated, on the savage; it was also used as a form to visually ennobled someone or explain events in life and from everyday life. That is why most of the portraits are from people that it is more easier to identify, to refer to. It is only after that the medium used enters the process of social massification and is turned in to a commodity to be used by the whole spectrum of the social sphere. So, most of the artworks made until the 19th century were, beside religious motifs, either commissioned portraits from wealthy people or society pictures, which had no context and were posed.

However, and this is what makes Édouard Manet's work (1832-1883) to have it's latent potential attractiveness and appealing, as well as most of all the impressionist movement artists, was in that together with portraying life through a direct observation of the world surrounding them, they brought as their subject-matter into the canvas non-performative domestic scenarios, not intended for public display, embodied with psychological and emotional potentialities. The case of Manet is because he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism, which also coincided with the social and economic circumstance that made possible the coming of age of the photographic portrait. Man Ray's Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, "highlights Man Ray’s central position among the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements and the significant range of contemporaries, celebrities, friends and lovers that he captured: from Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso to Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller and Catherine Deneuve." Whereas, Juergen Teller (1964) in his photography portraits blurs' the boundaries between portrait and genre scenes by capturing himself not as a photographer but as a member of the community being portrayed: people from the creative industries, celebrities, fashion designers, models, musicians, etc., such as Kate Moss, No.12, Gloucestershire (2010) and Bjork and son, Iceland (1993); or sometimes bare naked or in flamboyant postures representing contemporary life, for instance.