Posts Tagged lcc
Photo Conference: Architecture of Conflict
Will drop in links later, but I just got sent info on this and it looks like a seriously interesting conference. I’m hoping to go, will I see you there?
In collaboration with the London College of Communication the Architecture of Conflict seminar day will explore how photography has engaged with the militarisation of urban spaces. By bringing together practitioners, academics, and critics, the conference will examine how visual artists have depicted the often violent interaction between warfare and cities.
The Architecture of Conflict Conference and the Media and Conflict Interchange are both part of our Conflict Season, which will focus on the wider debate surrounding the representation of conflict in the visual arts and film.
Conference Programme
11.00 – 11.15
Introduction by Brigitte Lardinois, Deputy Director photography and the Archive Research Centre, University of the Arts London
11.15 – 12.15
Donovan Wylie, Photographer
Introduction to show + In Conversation with Greg Hobson, Curator of Photographs
12.15 – 13.15
Lunch and opportunity for delegates to see show
13.15 – 13.45
Hilary Roberts, Head Curator Photograph Archive Imperial War Museum
Cecil Beaton’s use of structure and form in his work as a Ministry of Information official photographer during the Second World War.
13.45 – 14.15
Melanie Friend, Photographer
Melanie will be speaking about her work which focuses on air shows and the militarisation of beaches and daily life.
14.15 – 14.45
Paul Lowe, Course Director, MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, London College of Communication
Paul will discuss how his work as a photographer in Bosnia and Palestine has explored the spatial and geographic aspects of conflict zones that much news photography ignores.
14.45 – 15.00
Break
15.00 – 15.30
Richard Daniels, Senior Archivist/Assistant Manager, University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre
Using material from the Stanley Kubrick Archive Richard will explore how Kubrick created Vietnam in an abandoned industrial estate in East London.
15.30 – 16.00
Jennifer Pollard, Senior Lecturer, History & Theory of Photojournalism & Documentary Photography, London College of Communication
The fallen ‘twin towers’ as central symbols within the photojournalistic convention of substituting bodies with buildings (or ‘cityscapes of flesh’) in the reportage of urban catastrophe.
16.00 – 16.30
Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism Cities have become the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, this talk will trace how political violence now operates through the sites, spaces, infrastructures and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
16.30 – 17.00
Plenary
Collateral Damage Part III
Posted by st84photo in Events, Exhibitions, Reviews on June 15, 2011
Panos Pictures have shared this video discussing the agency’s history and the changes in documentary photographer and photojournalism over the last few decades.
Harry Hardie who co-curated Collateral Damage with Paul Lowe (LCC) is a key contributor the discussion in the Panos video, as is Mishka Henner who exhibited in the Collateral Damage show.
This is a brief side-note to the conclusion of my review of Collateral Damage, which will be posted later today (and that’s a promise!), but the video is worth 25 minutes of your time and is an excellent way to augment the material ST84Photo has been discussing in this review.
Part I and Part II are also worth reading and chock full of links to the relevant sources.
Collateral Damage Part II (Paul Lowe & Harry Hardie)
Posted by st84photo in Events, Exhibitions, Reviews on June 14, 2011
You can read Part I here.
After a quick coffee and lunch, we reconvened at Novas CUC for the afternoon of the LCC seminar: talks by Paul Lowe (LCC), Mishka Henner, and Dr. Jennifer PollardDr. jennifer Pollard (LCC), and a roundtable discussion that also included John Davies.
This “talks and discussion” session was scheduled to be broadcast as a live webinar, with input from a global audience. But this wasn’t to be. I believe the politically astute term for this scenario may well be “technical glitch”. I also believe the politically not very astute gesture for this may well be a faux-shock gaping mouth and a finger pointing directly at the LCC MA Course Director. Hi Paul. Got my MA application, yet? Just checking.
To be fair, it was more that the venue had a very weak wifi signal, a fact known to ex-musical heathens like myself, from days spent practicing in the adjoining rehearsal rooms of Elevator Studios. But I was surprised that neither the venue nor the Look11 team seemed to have sought a workaround for this event, or to inform the LCC of this issue. I’m not sure who really dropped the ball here, but it was a fairly rookie mistake from someone or, more likely, several.
Lowe’s talk could be described as a Rough Guide to Conflict Photography History. I mean no insult there; as a relative newcomer to looking at conflict photography beyond the pages and webpages of the broadsheets, it was a very useful introduction to the debate, and I culled much in the way of notes for future reference.
Lowe’s argument was essentially that rather than there being a supposedly fairly recent trend of making a different form of conflict photography in response to photojournalistic efforts, photographers had been doing this all along. It wasn’t something that started with Paul Seawright and contemporaries (see here for more), but rather has it’s roots as early as the days of Stanley Green, who was experimenting at the start of the 20th Century with this notion of alternative story-telling, using metaphor and allegory to photograph the unphotographable (to quote that threadbare phrase).
He elaborates that while an increasing number of photojournalists are taking cues from the fine art world in how they make and present their work, we ought not to pass over the icons of classic photojournalims, like Green and Robert Capa, who frequently did find alternative ways to document what they witnessed.
That said, he noted that photojournalism trails behind fine art practice in adopting new techniques and methods of portrayal, leading me to question both why this is, and whether it will continue as the distribution media for classic photojournalism continues to weaken and new channels of distribution are created and experimented with. It seems to me that experimentation and reiterative processes are key to fostering creativity, and with a distribution media either in collapse or in flux (depending on the strength of view you take regarding the rise of the mount olympus of social media), the time is ripe for some truly innovative work to be produced. I think we may have yet to see that work be made, but I do wonder if, how, and when it might happen.
He also shared a few variations on The Capa Quote™ (note: quote must be uttered with defiant tone) “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Joel Sternfeld: If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you’re too close.
Todd Pappageorge: If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you’re not reading enough.
This sums up a move away from the literal into the metaphoric, a move perhaps most strongly demonstrated in the work of Paul Seawright, Simon Norfolk, and in Broomberg and Chanarin’s The Day Nobody Died (links in Part I of this review).
To conclude his talk, Lowe argued that instead of judging this style of work based on individual pieces or even individual photographers, we would be better off viewing it as a collective narrative that provides a sustained and complex response to the too-frequently seen classic photojournalistic images of conflict that blinds us emotionally by saturation of imagery to the reality of the situation they set out so earnestly to depict. As Lowe said later, “the problem isn’t in the presence of certain kinds of images [classic photojournalism] but in the absence of certain other kinds of images [the more allegorical and metaphorical style discussed in his talk].” Conflicts, and their effects, run too deep for a solely surface appearance of them to suffice in documenting their true nature.
Edit – struggling to find the relevant links for the rest of this post and must dash for work. Shall finish up later tonight.