On Thursday I was asked to document the latest work by Alex Lockett and Ian England which took place at the Rea Gardens as part of the ongoing series of [insertspace] interventions.  [insertspace] was founded in 2005, by Cheryl Jones, Charlotte Smith and Matt Westbrook, with the initial concept of setting out to explore the relationship between art and audience.The following is taken from the [insertspace] website:

“Lockett and England’s practice is centred around collaboration with constituencies on the edge of society. This, coupled with their interests in nature’s relationship with culture, as well as traditional and contemporary modes of communication, makes pigeon keeping the perfect vehicle for their investigations.

After twelve months of research with local pigeon racing clubs, the artists have built a loft from reclaimed materials, in which to keep their own brood. The loft echoes those they have visited, with additional features borrowed from past traditions: the red and white perches and colourful exterior mimic the pigeon lofts from a time when it was thought pigeons were attracted home by the brightly coloured patterns.

Fifteen pigeons have been kindly donated to the artists by local pigeon breeders, which Lockett & England will train and enter into races with the Aston & District Flying Club. A GPS system will be used to track one of the pigeons, giving an insight into their fascinating ability to return home.

In addition to the public programme, the artists will run workshops for participants in the Birmingham Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme throughout May and June. The group will learn about all aspects of pigeon keeping, whilst helping train the birds to race fitness”

A publication will be launched in November as part of The Event, to document this multi-faceted project, with additional contributions by artists, workshop participants and pigeon fanciers.

On a side note…the pesky Pigeons made me ill.

Copyright A. Jackson 2009

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The last time I went to the countryside a nice police officer arrested me. On questioning, as to why I’d been detained, he limply offered, as his defence, that as they don’t get many ‘coloureds’ in Hereford he believed that my presence was slightly suspicious….and I was duly detained for questioning…until released without charge.

In hindsight, this does indeed all sound like a scene set in some small Mid-Western town as the lone drifter…that’s me in this analogy by the way…well, drifts into town …..and is harassed by the maniacal police chief content on keeping the good people of his Mid-Western town safe from ‘outsiders’.

So, as you can see, I have a lot in common with that famous drifter….no, silly not The Littlest Hobo….John Rambo of course.

Well, that cathartic release was offered up as the mise-en-scène for the fact that perhaps England for me is not symbolised by the countryside… that world, whenever I’ve been to it, has either stared rudely at me or arrested me.

So perhaps if I was say, going to photographically represent ‘England, I’d focus on the cities - where most of my life has been lived…the space where I’m not totally posited as ‘other’ and where there are other ‘swarthy’ looking types like my good self.

Photography of course is the taxonomy of our subjectivity…a series of subjective dialogues or personal discourses, if you will; the parameters of which we, as photographers, set and construct at will. So someone, if they so wished, could represent England of course, in any way, shape or fashion that fulfilled their own subjectivity.

Now people, I am well and truly down with this.

My England is not your England…and your England is not mine.

The flaw within this, alas, is that I seem to see more and more representations that are one’s I only ever see from my train window - on my journey to other cities….one’s that don’t ever include people who look like me or who share the same streets as me.

I seem to see an ever protracted vision of England that have removed my history in this country from the archives. Mono-cultured visions of country villages, fetes, festivals, rolling hills, green rolling hills, no, deep green joyous rolling hills that speak in hushed tones of the history of a glorious past that gave birth to a proud people who civilised the world….wait, did I mention the green rolling hills?

*You are accordingly invited to read that paragraph back again, but this time with Jerusalem being played in the background…*

Well any how, you get the message; I’m talking about the photographic equivalents of the BBC period costume drama…an image of England unsoiled by mass immigration…an image of England that never was and never will be.

The latest photographic work that attempts to represent a nation, We English by Simon Roberts, he uses as his leitmotif - to examine notions of Englishness - the English and their pastimes.

Now, when I first heard about this work I was interested to see how Mr. Roberts would depict the massed throng of drunks undertaking the nation’s favourite pastime of binge drinking as they gorge themselves on cheap booze and end up in the gutter.

I wanted to see him at that great English festival…the Notting Hill Carnival….and how he’d respond to all of the Red Stripe bottle holding ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ skankers dancing up an incoherent storm…and so I was saddened to hear that Roberts’ was only including ’pastimes’ taking part in the countryside….because that’s where the English live….right?

But why attempt to explain a people via their connections to the landscape when so few of us indeed have any connection to it? And why visit all of the tourist traps? With this in mind who is to say that – as the images are taken in tourist traps – that all of the people captured are indeed ‘English’?

Pedantic of me perhaps…but it’s an interesting question….what if some of the people who are being used to depict a nation aren’t actually English? Ok it’s not exactly a Ben Shahn moment, and anyway, of course, the people are inconsequential figures in relation to the land…the great imposing wild land of the countryside.

Now, OK there’s no need for me to declare an interest here…you’re right…I’ve got ‘beef’ with the countryside…but I decided to put this aside and look afresh at We English.

I really wanted to like this series. Especially as Roberts’ on his We English blog had previously ‘dissed’ Martin Parr’s own vision of England in his British cities work.

But I didn’t.

There are a number of stand out images…Roberts is a good photographer - there are bound to be. But at times I felt that I was looking at images of England from my train seat. A series of images that flashed by, without resonating; that attempted to reach out to me but couldn’t hold on.

It was if I sat dislocated and hermetically sealed away from them. I felt posited as that very same passenger behind glass…the dispassionate viewer to scenes that I was familiar with…but ambivalent to.

The more that I looked at the images the more they seemed to be one’s captured by a stranger…or outsider…to England (conversely, his images of ‘foreigners’ in Motherland are more intimate).

They seemed to be made by someone who felt separated and distanced from what he saw – someone at odds with and unable to approach those within the ‘country’ rather than someone who was celebrating it….or its people. Someone, who let’s just say, had been run out of town a few times by a despotic Sheriff….not someone who was in love with it.

Maybe I’m not Roberts’ target audience…and maybe as Roberts himself cites it’s unfair to judge his images as 72dpi jpegs. Regardless of this, I just didn’t make a connection to them…I didn’t ‘feel’ them or see myself within them…and once more I didn’t see my England.

But of course it isn’t up to Roberts to afford me this vision…or indeed pretend that he can….he can only afford me of his own image of the English. His search for what has made him.

Personally, I feel that the concept of Englishness is such an amorphous, subtle and nuanced…and let’s just say a damn right intangible concept to be discussed within photographs of ‘pastimes’.

But this is Roberts’ self-made discourse. Robert’s own vision…and you can’t kick a man for wanting to share this….but maybe he isn’t trying to convince ‘Us English’…but those further a field.

What the hell, they’ll do well amongst the Anglophiles of the world who love a romanticised image of an England made real by a green and pleasant imagination.

Beyond my cynicism though…I must add that I love this country. It is the country of my birth a world that has made me all that I am and all that I know….and I can understand someone wanting to examine what it is that has fashioned them.

Perhaps though, Roberts should have called his book ‘My English’.

As ultimately, of course, these images are only Roberts’ vision of his England…and it was misguided of me to ever expect to see mine within them.

Mine can only be made by me…

….and yours only ever by you.

To see Simon Robert’s images click here.

Good night, and good luck.

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“In the transitioning from one geographical place to another, participants related moving into a psychological in-between space. In this space, they questioned, re-examined, and reflected on the meaning of who they had been…..as they moved towards repositioning themselves in new contexts. Thus, migrating was articulated as a process involving a departure from geographical and psychological places….towards finding and creating psychological places which incorporated who they were in [the] multiple locations [of their host and home countries”.

Michele Callahan Wolfson

Beyond an open door, within flat 39; a rusting bicycle sits on a balcony suspended six floors in the air. It is adorned by a makeshift washing line and a pair of white socks that gently wafts too and fro in a wind that carries upwards the shouts below of a mother for her child. As inside, and behind me, a mobile phone rings twice and then stops; and without realising it, another, albeit coded and distanced message, has been sent by a mother to her daughter from a village in Europe to a tower block in the West Midlands.

This is a work about migration. About the psychological affects engendered by those who leave all that they know behind in search of things that perhaps they will never find. Whether the reasons for migration are labelled as ‘economic’ or ‘Impelled’, or whether they are seen as ‘traditional’ or ‘new migrants’, the universal affects upon the transitional self, caught as it is between their changing geographical and psychological space are the same.

In 2004, the European Union enlarged its membership to include the so-called A8 Eastern European Countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This led to Britain’s largest ever wave of immigration into the country as an estimated 1 million people left their home countries and came to Britain. This work is about one of those who made that journey.

Marcela left her village of 2000 people, just outside Bratislava in 2005 and travelled for 26 hours by coach to come to England. She did not know a word of English. She worked as an au pair for a family in Wolverhampton, whilst slowly learning English, before later finding work in factories and currently a supermarket chain in Walsall. Whilst in Wolverhampton she met her partner, an Iraqi Kurd refugee, and they moved into their first home together in Walsall. They married in January 2009.

The images in this series are taken inside that home: the symbolic space that stands in for, as Wolson cites, ‘their psychological in-between space’. They live in England and yet they are not really here as their hearts are elsewhere. They seek solace in those who are the same and seemingly wait for the day until they can go back home once more.

Marcela, and perhaps others in her position, are here and yet they are not. As for those who long for return find their minds and their hearts are elsewhere; and so no roots are laid here in this makeshift and transitory world of England. Here within what has become this in-between life.

There is an absence that marks and makes real the spaces that temporarily define them. As at times this space appears to symbolise the hollowness of this makeshift life. Perhaps, as indeed for all migrants, length of stay decreases chances of return, and in turn soon this hollowness will fade as roots are finally laid.

But alas, in one sense, they will always find themselves posited between what they have left and what they have found, here in this world, at the end of the Golden Road.

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For awhile now I’ve been producing a work that explores the impact of changing geographical space on one’s psychological spaces. This work has been commissioned by the London School of Economics and Political Science and principally investigates the experiences of an economic migrant from Slovakia who moved in search of work from her village outside of Bratislava to Walsall in the West Midlands.

Caught between the identities of their home and host countries, migrants, at least psychologically, exist within a third space. No longer truly a member of their motherland, and not a member of their host country, they are in a limbo like state of identity. An insecure and inauthentic state that pushes the migrant further into themselves and in turn in search of those who they feel share their own experiences, rather than the indigenous population of their host country.

In this work, symbolically the interior spaces are used to examine the concept of their, or in the case of this work, the psychological spaces of one woman who traveled twenty-six hours on a coach to come to a country where she could not speak a single word of it’s language.

What pressures could possibly cause someone to do this? I’m not sure, but the Slovakian phrase ‘bez práce nie sú koláče’ may answer that question. Incidentally, it translates as….’no work, no cake.’

This work, provisionally entitled The Golden Road, will be a photography and video based work and is currently in the development and editing stage (as the photocopied image below evidences) and is to be exhibited at the LSE in January 2010.

‘Untitled’. Copyright A.Jackson 2009

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I originally wrote this posting (below) on December 30th 2006. At the time, my housemates had all left to see their families for Christmas. Tumi had flown to London and her partner Richard had taken his son Jaime to the Eastern Cape to spend the holidays with his father. I found myself alone in a house that would come alive at night, and as the draw of the moon cooled it’s heated frame, that the days summer Cape Town sun had warmed…it would moan and creak as I tried to sleep with a large kitchen Knife under my pillow. The next week someone would tear off the metal burglar bars and smash their way into my room - fortunately I was not there.

Well that’s the premise…and this is what I wrote back then in another time. More South African posts are available here…click it and scroll back in time.

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Just as I was about to drift off to sleep last night I thought I heard someone calling my name and I slowly fought my way out of the haze to sit upright in bed and listen. But nothing came, outside there was only the wind that blew through the trees and beyond it a steady hum of a city that had closed it’s eyes.

During the day I returned to Khayelitsha CFC for my third and final visit. I wasn’t sure what to expect as last Friday was quite bloody and unlike my first visit this time there were tears and cries of pain. A pregnant woman had come into trauma, she had begun to bleed quite excessively. She cried both out of anguish and pain and I remember her leaning down towards her unborn child to whisper some words of comfort, if not to her child, then to herself - the doctor came over and told her that her baby might die or it might live and she was wheeled away leaving her bloody sheets.

I walked over and photographed the sheets and a woman behind me whispered “..how can he take such a terrible photograph?” I’m not sure why but I sarcastically replied “it’s art”….she laughed and then I laughed and the world carried on.

In another room a large hulking man sat upright on a bench in only a pair royal blue briefs. He had been asleep in bed when his partner poured boiling water over his torso and groin. Flaps of skin hung off him. Later his partner would come in and be treated for cuts and bruises. Apparently in the night he had assaulted her and she waited for him to fall asleep before enacting her revenge.

Later a man with his hand in a bag full of blood would walk in and collapse. The bag burst its contents onto the floor and blood cascaded down the corridor. He had been shot in the wrist but luckily for him he was high and for now couldn’t feel the pain - although later he would. This could be any trauma unit in the West but here the difference is is that there is only one doctor on call. I cannot imagine the pressure that he is under.

Yesterday I returned.

At times in my life I’ve wished that I had a faith, that I belonged to some orgainised religion that could promise me that there was more to life than what I could see or feel but alas even as a child I could never find any omnipotent being to believe in and so I guess that I’m left with only the random and arbitrary happenings of life.

Perhaps thirty-six years ago the man who lay on the bed before me never knew that ultimately our paths would cross and that on the day of his death I would be there to photograph his hand resting on a red blanket. I didn’t find out his name; perhaps that was intentional.

I looked at him; his face partially covered by a thin white blankt: and looked at his open eyes and waited for them to blink as I loaded film into my camera. But of course they wouldn’t. I thought momentarily about what he had seen last and then I extended the legs of my tripod. I didn’t really feel anything - I know how that sounds. I was alone in the two bed morgue and all I thought about was the quality of light coming in through the door. Not even later when I stood next to his mother did I feel anything - everything was so matter of fact. There was no sad music in the background, no-one cried for him and in the corridor outside people joked and laughed. His was just another wasted life that went nowhere, a life made and destroyed in Khayelitsha, the invisible world that grows on the edges of the city. I know that I sound cold but it’s the one’s still left alive we should cry for.

His death was suspicious and so the police promised that his body would be taken to the government mortuary for a post mortem. The last time they promised this the body rotted for three days before being taken away.

Later a daughter brought in her father; he was slumped in a wheelchair. After tests it was deduced that he had suffered a severe stroke and that his chances of survival were low. When the daughter was told this of course in the fraction of a second her world changed and she cried uncontrollably.

The doctor left the room and left me alone with her. She looked at me and I looked towards the floor…I waited for a while then looked up again to see her crying and still looking at me. I fiddled with my camera and tried not to cry as I remebered when the doctors had told me that my father also was going to die. He lived and I wanted to tell her to have hope but; she couldn’t speak English and anyway I knew that I didn’t really want to leave my seated silence. Later she rang her pastor for comfort.

A mother brought her young child in. He had dragged a pan full of soup off the stove and over his head: his face was burnt. The doctor stopped as her read the case file, this was the third time that this had happened. He had burns on top of burns. Whether it was direct abuse or neglect the result was the same and the child went back home again.

My last day ended and I too went home. I shook Timmo’s hand and felt like thanking him for the work that he does as I know it takes a toll on him- but I didn’t. I was glad to have met him and seen a part of his life. We wished each other goodbye and I closed the door. I’ve been lucky to have met so many good people. Perhaps the only faith we need is the faith in the knowledge that here on earth there are still good people with good hearts.

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If there is a pride of lions, well surely there must be a ‘brag’ of photographers…right? Well, anyway, if not a brag, I wonder what else you would call a group of photographers? Perhaps someone else, infinitely more wise than I, has suggested a ‘pack’ of photographers. Anyway, regardless of what you may call an assemblage of camera users, I always feel distinctly out of place amongst them, at least one’s whom I’m not acquainted with.

There is a tangible air, an almost electrical charge of hubris that, like the calm before a thunder storm, is felt all around me. As the hierarchical jostling occurs, as photographers piss all around them to mark and claim their turf….but of course then the free booze and food at these things kick in and then it’s all ‘gravy baby’…to coin a phrase.

I once went to a VII seminar in London and sat amongst the crowd of photographers who were all decked out in a wardrobe styled by central casting. All ’suited and booted’ in customary and almost ceremonial like chains of identity….Leica M8’s and Canon 5D’s…worn visibly around their necks - although never used - as they reinforced their identities with their completed uniforms of black or red checked Arabic scarves and photo vests. Add to this the mutterings of having been or about to become embedded with some infantry division or the other in Iraq cemented the occasion….and my exclusion - self imposed or otherwise - from it.

Perhaps I just don’t like the idea of belonging to anything….which is why indeed the solitary pursuit of photography appeals.

Or perhaps again, photographers are more suited to being the ‘only photographer in the village’? We always like to think of ourselves as somehow being unique and separate from the crowd. The only one’s in the room who can truly ’see’ the world around them that others ignore. Commentators enabled by some unknown force to capture, summerise and explain the world via our frozen visions…for the good of mankind…OK, that’s bollocks but it sounded good.

Ultimately, maybe the reason why I don’t like ‘chillin’ with other photographers is as Groucho put it, perhaps “I just don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member”.

OK, I’m heading back now to my small corner of the village…

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Taliban is a word that has dominated our lives since the Autumn of 2001, as such, it was interesting to watch this Magnum in Motion presentation.

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