Week Two – The Feedback Loop

My marks from Steph and Paul for the PHO702 module ‘Informing Contexts’ were pleasing – a module grade of 66.8%, with some very fair and helpful feedback. The key issues for me in the early stages of FMP are to 1) experiment shooting without flash at the coalface; 2) think about and research visual practices relating to typologies and sequencing of my work; 3) read around the subject, looking at painting in particular (which I have already started, by recently reading Malcolm Andrews’ fascinating book Landscape and Western Art); and 4), further research how the photographers of mining and miners have approached the constructive and conceptual elements of their work, and in doing so to read more Allan Sekula and also Stuart Franklin’s The Documentary Impulse. As a result I’ve just ordered Franklin’s book together with Sekula’s Photography Against the Grain.

I felt my Pecha Kucha presentation to Wendy last week went positively. I had asked a couple of trusted fellow students to review it ahead of its submission, and one commented that it was like a fireside chat, as if they were there in the Forest with me. Wendy particularly liked the portraits of miners having just exited the gale and we discussed this as one approach to experiment with further.

The outcomes of the first (of seven) 1:1 supervision sessions I will have throughout my FMP were as follows:

1. Further experiment with portraiture, especially just after miners have exited the mine entrance, with and without flash. Look at Gabriella Sancisi’s work.

2. Shoot more inside mine shafts without the miners present (i.e. with them behind me, as I can’t enter on my own), to potentially use as a large backdrop at an exhibition.

3. Shoot more mining memorials, experimenting with different approaches. I need to look at the work of Raymond Depardon and Paul Bonaventura (I happen to already have the former’s La France de Raymond Depardon).  

4. Try and find more family archive images. This will require hunting through more old shoe boxes at my mother’s house and also asking her cousin if she has any old pictures (which, chatting within the family, we think she might have).

5. Consider recording (audio and/or visual) an old miner talking about life underground. Apparently a few old miners can occasionally be found in one or two of the Forest hostelries, but obviously these are shut at the moment, so I’ll have to think about how best to approach this.

6. Shoot miners underground without flash, as also recommended by Steph and Paul. Paul had already referred me to Kjell-Ake Andersson’s Gruvarbetare I Wales project from 1973 (which I wrote about in the 14/02/20 post in Week Three of the last module), specifically to look at Andersson’s style of shooting without flash, using only the light from the mining helmet lamp.

7. Draft and submit my FMP Written Proposal by 22/06/20, thinking about the discrete areas I want to develop and how I want to frame the project in the context of my family history. This needs to include a risk assessment form at the end of the document. 

So there’s plenty to do, then, whilst I await the next opportunity to get down to the Forest with my camera bag. At the time of writing, the lockdown is gently being lifted by the British government and my instinct is that I should get down to the Forest as much as practically possible, just in case there is a second wave of Covid-19 infection and the nation is forced into a second incarceration.

Meanwhile, I was recently reading an interview with internationally-renowned environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky in the Photo London e-magazine (referenced below). In it he says of his work Anthropocene, “Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting tools of our times”. Uneasy contradiction is certainly part of what intrigues me about free mining. As I have written many times in previous posts, climate change denial is not something I come across in the Forest. Context is everything, and the output of coal mined in the Forest per annum, currently around 50 tonnes, is minuscule compared to, say, annual coal output in Australia or China. And as I reported in my 25/02/20 post (Week Five of Informing Contexts, and referenced below) the UK Government recently exempted the free miners from any restrictions against the mining of coal (“We….have decided that the Forest of Dean free miners will be allowed to sell coal because of the volume involved, the unique nature of this tradition, and its reliance on local domestic sales”). Nonetheless, the uneasy contradiction remains with me. Indeed, it is one of the drivers of my FMP…..the contradictions, the juxtapositions.

One of these juxtapositions are the old and current mine workings sitting in one of Britain’s most ancient and beautiful forests. I’m intrigued, compositionally, by the trees with their gnarling branches and the ground-level ferns and other greenery, and in particular the way nature intermingles and at times rapidly takes over man’s creations. Numerous photographers have made decent careers out of shooting abandoned, overrun buildings and other man-made sites. A recent example I particularly like is Hamburg-based Henning Rogge’s work Bombenkrater, a study of Second World War bomb crater sites in Germany’s woods and forests. Apart from being superbly researched, his style seems to be slow and methodical (much like my own) resulting in images that have poignancy and serene stillness. I came across Rogge’s work in an excellent article on the Lenscratch website (referenced below), in which the journalist Matthew Moore writes: “Too often though, these types of projects are comprised of over-saturated, over-sensationalised, ruin porn. What I love about Rogge’s images is the subtly they posses. Becher-esque in their approach, they have the perfect blend of beauty and horror. Just enough beauty to draw you into the image and hold you there, giving viewers ample time to truly consider the magnitude of what they are seeing.” The horror of coal mining accidents, reflected in memorials in the Forest, clearly doesn’t quite reach the same level as that of a World War, but nevertheless I do feel that there is a magnitude to the story of coal free mining and in particular the way it has impacted, shaped and defined the local culture in the Forest of Dean. I should be very pleased to deliver an FMP that conveys this magnitude in the manner that Rogge has with his work. And how interesting that the Becher’s were referenced in the article, given their work on coal mines in the 1960’s that I greatly admire.

In his book The Hidden Life of Trees, another German, forester Peter Wohlleben writes: “As foresters like to say, the forest creates its own ideal habitat” (2016:100). I doubt that Wohlleben has visited the Forest of Dean, but if he were to, and in the context of my comments in the paragraph above, he’d see how prescient his observation is.

And finally, whilst reviewing and editing down my project images taken thus far into a long-list, I came across this group shot taken during the last module, less formal in composition but nonetheless one that I am pleased with:

References:

PHOTO LONDON. E-Magazine, Issue 1. Available at: https://online.flippingbook.com/view/860671/4-5/ [accessed 08/05/20]

UK GOVERNMENT. News. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/air-quality-using-cleaner-fuels-for-domestic-burning/outcome/summary-of-responses-and-government-response [first accessed 22/02/20]

ROGGE, Henning. 2020. History Based Landscapes. Available at: http://lenscratch.com/2020/06/henning-rogge-history-based-landscapes [accessed 06/06/20]

WOHLLEBEN, Peter. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees. London: William Collins.