Critical Reflective Diary PHO705

Socially Engaged – Mariama Attah

| Phil Hill
Figure 1: Phil Hill (April, 2021) Garden Incinerator in my Brothers garden
Figure 2: Phil Hill (April, 2021) Garden incinerator in my parents garden

I have reached a point in my project where I really need to consider the way that my photographs are representing the people in the images. There are some areas that have come up, that I have been drawn to in fact. For example, there are aspects to the beliefs that my mother holds, which really feed into the unreliable narrator idea and the way that mis-information proliferates. For example, upon my last visit home, I have noticed more objects around my parents home, such as the garden incinerator’s that both my parents and my brother have (Fig 1 & 2). They use these to burn anything that has an identifying address on instead of garden waste, which is born from some of the conspiracy theories that my mother is particularly interested in. I have not really considered this as part of the unreliable narrator project before however, my family are very much following a great deal of the mis-information and false narratives that exist on the internet, especially around the pandemic and attempts to vaccinate. There are new subtle hints towards this attitude to Covid, which can be seen in the portrait of my brother’s wife and her ‘mask exempt’ badge (Fig: 3).

Figure 3: Phil Hill (April, 2021) Sharon [not yet edited]

I have avoided this part of my family’s character up to now, but feel that it has become quite an important part to potentially include, owing to the nature of the subjects that I am exploring. My initial feelings are that I can potentially leave these aspects in a future sequence with little to no explanation as it drives the unreliable narrator theme through the work, leaving readers to discover these elements in the work. This is my family however, and it is not my intention to draw negative reaction to any of the people included in the work. This is important to me. How do I include them whilst remaining empathetic and respectful for the individual? I don’t believe that anyone who believes that Covid is a conspiracy is coming from a bad place and I also feel that it is actually important to analyse the reasons why they believe it in an open discussion that does not resort to partisan stone throwing. Neuroscientist, Hannah Critchlow notes that our beliefs are constructed to help us understand the world around us, we create the rules in which we see the world operate (2021). Critchlow’s suggestion is that as a way of trying to understand something that is too large to comprehend, such as the make up of the universe or the way that a global pandemic has spread, it is completely natural to gravitate toward religion and other beliefs.  A recent study on the way that ideas and information spreads through the internet found that lies spread much faster than truth, noting “false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it” (Vosoughi, et al., 2018). The challenge is in the way that others might look at and potentially mock those who believe in such theories.

Socially Engaged practice

Collaborative practice might be a way of bridging this. Mariama Attah made a really valuable keynote lecture during adapt on this way of working (2021). Her interest is in overlooked visual culture, which I believe my project falls into. Her discussion centered around the ways that we can share power as photographers and having a collective voice. I need to do more. I have been very focused on understand a narrative from my own perspective and collection images without necessarily talking through the process with my family, apart from the correspondence that I have sent out to my grandmother. I think the lack of response from her has created a certain apprehension in talking to my parents at any length about the project. This is something that I must challenge as it potentially could lead to a problematic end result that does not include those I am photographing.

Attah noted elements of a socially engaged practice (2021):

  • Collaboration
  • Conversation
  • Empathy
  • Acting as an Ally
  • Questioning photography’s history
  • Privilege and Power
  • Advocacy

I now need to look at some of these elements much more closely and investigate whether I am using them faithfully, for example:

Conversation:

I identified this early in in the project but have yet to explore it fully. I have conducted two interviews with distant uncles and also spoken to a cousin who I haven’t seen in 10 years. I must start the process with my mother. I think that I have found this to be too close for me to get past so far, as Marianne Hirsh also noted “Perhaps it is the familial look itself that makes it difficult to read this picture which will not reveal any identifiable truth” (1997, p. 104) where the same might be true of any familial exchange I may have with close family members. It remains important to continue working through this the conversations I have with more and more of my family will enable a more empathetic approach, another one of Attah’s socially engaged elements

Advocacy:

Now that I have come across more and more of the extreme views held by members of my family, it creates the question of how much advocacy these ideas should be allowed. The have every right to believe them. They are also an interesting evolution in the idea of the unreliable narrator – but that doesn’t mean that I should include for either of these reasons. It will be important to consider the reaction of others towards them should I choose to include the images, which will be an important part of the conversation, above.

Comparing to others:

Figure 4: Anthony Luvera (2014) ASSISTED SELF-PORTRAIT OF JOE MURRAY

How is my approach comparing to others? Anthony Luvera is a photographer that I have looked at previously during the MA, his approach to community and socially engaged projects is possibly one of the best examples of how this approach can foster a faithful representation of all involved (Fig: 4). His interest in the ethics of photography is something that I keep returning to, as he states “One of the things about any kind of social practice, whether it be within the expanded field of photographic practice, or another art form such as applied theatre, is a tension between the process of working with participants and the products that are created and then circulated to audiences” (Luvera in Homer, 2019) echoing the thoughts of Attah, when she noted “Photography’s history has been about classifying people & object in orders of worth and value” (2021). A key takeaway from my last supervisor meeting with Wendy was an idea of belief, which I feel is a way of creating a respectful approach to the work. Ultimately, I must move forward by conversing with the people in my project to discuss this idea of belief and how best they wish that belief to be represented.

Bibliography

Attah, M., 2021. Adapt 21: Responding Through Curating. Falmouth: Falmouth Flexible.

Critchlow, H., 2021. The Science of Fate. 1 ed. London: Hodder Paperbacks.

Hirsch, M., 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. 2012 Reissue ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Luvera, A., 2019. Anthony Luvera – interview: ‘Photography is a way of telling stories about the world’ [Interview] (15 August 2019).

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. & Aral, S., 2018. The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), pp. 1146-1151.

4th Meeting 20/4

| Phil Hill
Supervisor meeting PDF 20/4 (Unreliable Narrator)
Date of Supervision Meeting20/04/21
Start time of Meeting12:30
Length of Meeting in minutes35 minutes
Meeting Notes & Action PointsUseful discussion about how the project is developing to consider the idea of belief, which meant that I have a way of approaching respectful representation of persons depicted in the work. I have some work to do to tie in some of this new work with the existing images and if it should be a development away from the original. Writing will also be useful to properly contextualise the project.
– I suggested that my outcome could include differences between each version in order to undermine the reading of it, which was supported by Wendy and suggested this is the way we individually read the family album. 
– Zoe Leonard would be useful to look at in the way that she utilises false narratives
– Susan Hiller in the way that she considers ideas of belief
– Marina Warner – Phantasmogoria
Date of Next Proposed Meeting16/06/21 @12:00

Recent shoot reflections 18/04/21

| Phil Hill

I am still no closer to understanding the reasons behind rifts and images within the archive. My mother is fairly closed about the topic and I have yet to really probe that aspect. I have also not had a reply from my grandmother as of yet, so there is no real chance of uncovering anything from the other side. Does this matter? I recently had a peer critique with Claire, who questioned whether I was going to provide some kind of answer to all of this or if it should remain unsolved. There is potential to completely change the way the work reads if I were to over explain and try to give answers. I am not really concerned that I might not find them either. The universality in the work, in the sense of the fractured family, as pointed out by Claire is what makes it interesting, which was a comment I received during the portfolio reviews. This idea of mystery keeps it interesting, with the potential to keep coming back to it and trying to work this thing out.

Figure 1: Phil Hill (April, 2021) Images collected from archive and recent photographs [before editing]

Now that the restrictions have lifted a bit, I have been able to continue the project and add more of my own images to the mix. On visiting my parents, I was very interested in all of the objects that they have within the family home that are linked to parts of this, feeding the unreliable narrator within the project. My parents have never really kept many family images on shelves and mantles etc, this is in great contrast to my wife’s family homes, which display many generations of family on the walls and on shelves. This led me to consider other items and objects on display that have links and represent the themes within my work. For example, the image of the sunflowers is a painting made by my brother dated 1997, it has been on the wall above the television since then. The image was framed for us by my grandmother and probably one of the last links through an object that we have in the house. This idea of objects is something that I am coming back to, in anthropological terms they are a way of learning about people and cultures in the absence of them. Matthew Engelke refers to an idea of ‘material culture’ (2017: 6-7), which defines the way that anthropologists and also archaeologists can learn about a people from the things that they leave behind and I can also use the objects with in the archive and within the family home to better understand in the absence of members of my own family – in their absence.

An interesting development related to the pandemic, is in the additional distance it places on my view of my parents home, which is also my childhood home. There was always part of this as I live in the South East, my parents two and a half hours away in the South West, limited the amount of trips I make to see them under normal circumstances. With the pandemic, there are more limits placed and I have not seen them for nearly a year. Owing to the research of my project, I have found that the way I look through objects within the house quite differently. I would never call this objectively, but an element of distance means that I can start to document without a usual emotive connection attached to it. Wayne C. Booth’s definition of the unreliable narrator places variations of distance between the characters, the narrator, and the author of the story (1975: 155), and I will need to determine how much distance I place between myself and the project. I am the author of the work but also a narrator of it – just as unreliable a the narrative I present. Claire also noted this in our peer discussion, suggesting the consideration of how much of myself I have within the work. It is a personal journey, so on the one hand I should be included somehow. However, the universality of the fractured family could mean that I can work to make the project broader with me presenting and narrating the work for the reader.

Bibliography

Booth, W. C., 1975. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 11 ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Engelke, M., 2017. Think Like an Anthropologist. London: Pelican Books.

Communities and Communication Prep

| Phil Hill

I have spent the past week preparing to discuss my work at the Staffordshire University ‘Community and Communication conference.’ At the end of the last module, I submitted an abstract (Fig: 1) relating to my last wipp, which is based in the local community that I live now. As I have evolved the project and I am no longer looking directly at my local community for the FMP , it kind of felt like I was reverse engineering the presentation and going back to work that I have moved away from. Since completing the presentation and paper I am delivering however, I have found it valuable in the way that I am now able to articulate ideas and also it has identified a number of points of research, which really feed into my current work. As I see it, the project is partly a departure from this idea of exploring community through local spaces and the people that I share it with: Ideas of Barthes’ idiorhythmic separation of sharing spaces but living independent lives and Graham Harmon’s Object Orientated Ontology to reconsider objects and their agency independently from an anthropocentric view point.

Communities and Communication
Figure 1: Phil Hill (December, 2020) Communities ad Communication research and draft conference abstract.

These are ideas that have heavily influenced my work over the last few modules and are present in my fmp project. Ultimately, that should be the goal of my practice – to construct work positioned in these areas. This should evolve as my practice evolves, which I feel is demonstrated in the way that I have moved past the idea of connection to my adopted town of Watford and into the project about my personal connections and family.

This presentation has also given me the opportunity to scrutinise some of the ideas that I have been putting forward. For example, nostalgia and the way that we consider a past being somehow better. It was important to discuss why this is, which has led to looking at the Derrida concept of ‘Hauntology’ (2006: 10) in how we are effectively haunted by objects and views of the past and represent this through photography.

I was also forwarded some really useful texts from my peers, which have a great deal of relevance to both this presentation and the way that my project has evolved now. Karen Cross and Julia Peck’s editorial on photography, archive and memory (2010: 127-138), which notes a number of areas that will be worth investigating moving forward. For example, “The archive is opened to the threat of memory: the memory of its exclusions” (p. 129), creates a link to the way that Barthes’ discusses how communities seek to exclude those that do not fit with the community ideal. It is important to consider what is not included in the archive – in this case what is not within my family albums, or cut from them. Cross and Peck also pick up on a number of other text that I have been using in my research and specifically reference Marianne Hirsch’s idea of ‘Post-Memory’ and also personal and collective memory (p. 133). This serves to consolidate those ideas and I fully intend to unpack this further and feed it into my current work.

Presenting to the conference (I hope) will be incredibly valuable in my development of research and academia, feeding back into my own teaching practice. One of my aspirations from this MA was to submit and deliver research at a conference. Putting together this discussion and presentation will also be really valuable in positioning my current work in the wider context of the concepts and ideas that I have been developing throughout the MA, which will be useful when I come to write my Critical Review of Practice.

Bibliography

Cross, K. & Peck, J., 2010. Editorial: Special Issue on Photography, Archive. Photographies, September, 3(2), pp. 127-138.

Derrida, J., 2006. Spectres of Marx. New York: Routledge Classics.

Tönnies, F., 2001. Community and Civil Society. Translation ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.