A Walk of 20 Steps: Representing memory of place “…’(T)he everyday’ is a space where practice and representation are complexly interrelated, where the lived reality of the quotidian co-exists with clichés, mythologies, stereotypes and unsourced quotations” (Moran, 2005, p.13) . Pierre Nora’s (1989) work documenting the diverse range of French national sites of memory demonstrates that the “where” of memory changes over time and that official memory can be challenged by alternative forms of cultural memory. Just like memory, then, place is also unstable and open to shifting social perceptions about its function and use. Joe Moran (2005) examines how representations of the everyday have influenced the ideas surrounding the relationship between public and private spheres in postmodern culture. Overlooked, ignored and discounted as a source of meaning for wider cultural developments, everyday culture then becomes a source of resistance for Antonio Gramci’s (2005) “spontaneous philosophy” and Michel Foucault’s (1980) “subordinate and unofficial knowledge”. The everyday culture my doctoral visual practice gazes upon, analyses and questions is the suburban landscape of my hometown, Wellesley Massachusetts, fifteen miles west of Boston, the state’s capital. My photographs capture daily shopping life in the tradition of deadpan photography depicting local vernacular which emerged from America in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Dan Graham. Of particular inspiration to my photographic method was the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher who began systematically documenting industrial sites around Germany in the late 1950s. The pair was interested in returning to the ‘straight’ aesthetic and social concerns of German practice in the 1920s and 1930s and a rejection of the contemporary leanings towards sentimentality. While the photographs of Central Street naturalise the assumptions and myths of conspicuous consumption, the act of photographing and decoding these signifiers of everyday upper-middle class life offers me space to question the legitimacy of this dominant culture of commodity fetishism and the effects of this landscape upon my identity.

A Walk of 20 Steps: Representing memory of place “…’(T)he everyday’ is a space where practice and representation are complexly interrelated, where the lived reality of the quotidian co-exists with clichés, mythologies, stereotypes and unsourced quotations” (Moran, 2005, p.13) . Pierre Nora’s (1989) work documenting the diverse range of French national sites of memory demonstrates that the “where” of memory changes over time and that official memory can be challenged by alternative forms of cultural memory. Just like memory, then, place is also unstable and open to shifting social perceptions about its function and use. Joe Moran (2005) examines how representations of the everyday have influenced the ideas surrounding the relationship between public and private spheres in postmodern culture. Overlooked, ignored and discounted as a source of meaning for wider cultural developments, everyday culture then becomes a source of resistance for Antonio Gramci’s (2005) “spontaneous philosophy” and Michel Foucault’s (1980) “subordinate and unofficial knowledge”. The everyday culture my doctoral visual practice gazes upon, analyses and questions is the suburban landscape of my hometown, Wellesley Massachusetts, fifteen miles west of Boston, the state’s capital. My photographs capture daily shopping life in the tradition of deadpan photography depicting local vernacular which emerged from America in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Dan Graham. Of particular inspiration to my photographic method was the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher who began systematically documenting industrial sites around Germany in the late 1950s. The pair was interested in returning to the ‘straight’ aesthetic and social concerns of German practice in the 1920s and 1930s and a rejection of the contemporary leanings towards sentimentality. While the photographs of Central Street naturalise the assumptions and myths of conspicuous consumption, the act of photographing and decoding these signifiers of everyday upper-middle class life offers me space to question the legitimacy of this dominant culture of commodity fetishism and the effects of this landscape upon my identity.

The book will make explicit the benefit of linking practice skills with contextual research and knowledge. Each project will point students to well-known textual and visual contextual sources which will further develop their awareness. Unlike many titles in this subject area, this book joins together contextual underpinning and practice. In essence, both skills and contextual knowledge are embedded within each project rather than delivered as separate elements, so students effectively contextualise through practice. The projects work like a briefing document containing all the necessary information required to spark off practice ideas.

This book is the catalogue from the photographic exhibition, geographies, yearnings, identities, held at at Fiesole Art School near Florence in 2006.

Collections of photographs by photographers are rarely envisioned in the book form, but instead use the medium solely as an alternative distribution channel. In addition, most critically respected photographic publications are rightly perceived as surrogates for the gallery print; for the history of photography has fetishised the experience of viewing an original above all else. I propose that authored documentary photography books can become super-sensory works, documents of participation, intervention and touch.

A Walk of 20 Steps: Representing memory of place “…’(T)he everyday’ is a space where practice and representation are complexly interrelated, where the lived reality of the quotidian co-exists with clichés, mythologies, stereotypes and unsourced quotations” (Moran, 2005, p.13) . Pierre Nora’s (1989) work documenting the diverse range of French national sites of memory demonstrates that the “where” of memory changes over time and that official memory can be challenged by alternative forms of cultural memory. Just like memory, then, place is also unstable and open to shifting social perceptions about its function and use. Joe Moran (2005) examines how representations of the everyday have influenced the ideas surrounding the relationship between public and private spheres in postmodern culture. Overlooked, ignored and discounted as a source of meaning for wider cultural developments, everyday culture then becomes a source of resistance for Antonio Gramci’s (2005) “spontaneous philosophy” and Michel Foucault’s (1980) “subordinate and unofficial knowledge”. The everyday culture my doctoral visual practice gazes upon, analyses and questions is the suburban landscape of my hometown, Wellesley Massachusetts, fifteen miles west of Boston, the state’s capital. My photographs capture daily shopping life in the tradition of deadpan photography depicting local vernacular which emerged from America in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Dan Graham. Of particular inspiration to my photographic method was the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher who began systematically documenting industrial sites around Germany in the late 1950s. The pair was interested in returning to the ‘straight’ aesthetic and social concerns of German practice in the 1920s and 1930s and a rejection of the contemporary leanings towards sentimentality. While the photographs of Central Street naturalise the assumptions and myths of conspicuous consumption, the act of photographing and decoding these signifiers of everyday upper-middle class life offers me space to question the legitimacy of this dominant culture of commodity fetishism and the effects of this landscape upon my identity.

These days we rarely encounter photographs that have gone wrong: images that are blurred, out of focus, over or under exposed or just plain failed. But our failure to think about failure is having a detrimental impact on our relationship with photography and how we interpret photographic truth and meaning. A consequence of removing errors from the prevailing image culture is that accuracy and resemblance become the predominant visual signifiers of the photographs we see on a daily basis. Accurate photographs seem to depict things ‘as they are’, and to provide a transparent gateway to real events. These neutral, authorless photographs become the basis for an image economy where the tyranny of post-truth claims can take hold. Without a concept of photography as an embodied activity involving human decision making and the limitations of technology, the resulting image becomes the sole locus of attention for the truth claims about what it depicts. Photographic errors are important because they present us with evidence of the contingency of the photograph, breaking the spell of neutrality and reasserting human/technical relationship in the creation of the image. The proposed paper draws on my practice-based research project In Pursuit of Error which is a ethnographic study of the error in photographic practice. Theoretical models drawn from feminist theory, performance theory and aesthetics are used to interrogate the images and narratives collected from photographers. The error is revealed as a discontinuous but valued phenomenon which disrupts the conventions of photographic representation, and proposes the deliberate or accidental photographic error as an emergent, processual and performative act. The paper will argue that the error presents an alternative photographic epistemology from that found in contemporary visual culture: a form of ‘messy’, embodied knowledge which challenges a neutral and machine-led concept of photography in which veracity is the central signifier, proposing instead a concept of photography which acknowledges the subjectivity of the photographic ‘act-in-context’.

This exhibition, held at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and organised jointly with the University of Chester, examines how abstract painting and photography enter into a fluid relationship of ‘cause and effect’. Painting becomes a catalyst for photography and, equally, photography leads to the creation of painting. These transactions invite the viewer to explore visual experience and the construction of meaning.

The photographic error opens up a paradoxical space between machine and human and presents this space as a gap in the conventions of photographic practice both technologically and culturally. By undermining the certainty which attaches to our use of technology the error opens us to the possibility of playing with and against the technology we use, subverting the rules in order to create something new. In the third dimension of the error we are able to question the photographic practices and images which we are surrounded with daily. We can ask what purpose and meaning photography has to us: what are we trying to do when we take a photograph?

Ruined spaces of our recent past leave us with premature waste in a flux of unfinished disposal. Many photographer’s books are elegaic records of such derelict spaces, yet few break free from Western codex-form publishing protocols. With rigid sequencing, determined narrative and a tendency to over-classify, many publications of this type celebrate the inevitability of decline rather than re-imagine a more contingent future. Non-codex and hybrid book forms however, are untypical, yet provide a looser, free-form narrative and for the reader, this kind of book can be as much of a ruined space as the very site it’s aiming to depict.