Time & Motion Studies: New documentary photography beyond the decisive moment
Curated by Simon Bainbridge
Saturday 22nd October – Saturday 26th November
Tuesday to Friday 10am – 5pm; Saturday 10am – 4pm
Hereford Museum & Art Gallery, Broad Street, Hereford, HR4 9AU
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Vanessa Winship: Georgia, 2009-10
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Time & Motion Studies presents the works of five
photographers, each the result of deliberate and sustained observation.
But more than that, each employs a carefully thought-out strategy for
their study, a methodology by which to transcribe and communicate ideas
about the world, tackling subjects that aren’t always obviously
photogenic. For the photographers in the exhibition, the ideas they are
trying to communicate take prescience over aesthetic concerns, although
these remain important, both in terms of engaging viewers and in
contributing to the development of a wider photographic language.
The festival gives me an opportunity to show these works,
five excellent examples of the diversity of contemporary documentary
practice, and all of which have appeared in
British Journal of Photograph,
some in the recent past, which I hope the photography crowd will enjoy
seeing in the flesh, some of it exhibited for the first time anywhere.
But the festival attracts a wider public than just the photography
crowd, particularly at the Hereford Museum & Art Gallery, and for
these visitors I hope to give a flavour of what photography can be and
what it can say, beyond the traditional idea of the artist photographer
as someone wandering the earth communing with nature. And by showing
five very different approaches, I hope to expose the photographers
behind the images, to get viewers thinking about how they position
themselves – both physically, embedding themselves into situations, and
in terms of negotiating themselves into spaces – to make their pictures.
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| Donald Weber
Interrogations: Big Zone, Small Zone |
In the case of Donald Weber, that’s a very uncomfortable
space. Having befriended a Ukrainian policeman whose career was on the
rise, he spent years negotiating access to the interrogation room the
officer spent much of his time, gaining confessions from mostly petty
criminals. Waiting for the moment of confession, the results are a
terrifying insight into the justice system, but also, a defining point
of departure for the subjects – a cathartic experience sometimes – after
which life may never be the same again.
Robbie Cooper exemplifies the increasing convergence between
still and moving images, using the first digital camera that truly
delivers both, in high resolution. Technology is also at the heart of
his subject matter, which is concerned with how our identities are
becoming wrapped up in new virtual territories – in this case, capturing
animated faces close up through as his subjects engage with computer
games and other screen-based worlds. Manuel Vasquez also touches on
technology, particularly surveillance culture, in his montages that
splice together different moments in time. Captured in largely anonymous
public places, they capture the anxiety as well as a sense of spectacle
within the spotlight of this constant observation.
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| Manuel Vasquez:
Traces |
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| Robbie Cooper
Immersion |
George Georgiou is also working with sequential imagery. He
is interested in the continued influence Russia plays on its former
Soviet neighbours, and how this is manifested in the daily lives of
ordinary people, capturing them in sequences shot from the same vantage
point. His installation at this year’s festival is his most ambitious
realisation of this approach, and is the first time he has presented a
work on such a scale. His partner and travelling companion Vanessa
Winship takes an altogether different approach. Where as Georgiou
remains largely hidden to his subjects, she places her camera in such a
way as to invite her subjects to present themselves. She seeks a direct
connection, and somehow manages to capture the complexity of this
dialogue in the directness and vulnerability of their gazes. Putting
them together in the same show, I aim to demonstrate that a photograph
is not so much the result of what’s in front of the camera, rather than
the motives, instincts and ideas of the person behind it.
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| Shadow waiting, Ukraine |
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| Detail. |
Time & Motion Studies also refers to this year’s
festival theme of motion, a concept I struggled with at first (after
all, photography is all about distilling moments into single frames),
until I thought about this idea of the photographer waiting, quiet and
still, capturing what before his or her camera. It also got me thinking
about one of the most enduring concepts in photography, now nearly 60
years old – “The Decisive Moment”, as termed by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In it’s most simple form, the idea was that every image of a “stolen
moment” had it’s own decisive moment, a split-second capture in which
“simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the
rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms [expressed and
signified] that fact”.
It’s not a very fashionable concept anymore (especially when
you think about the Becher School photographers who have dominated in
the past 25 years, with their monumental images, largely of scenes that
denote no single important moment of time). But a sense of the right
moment pervades in photography nonetheless, along with photography’s
pictorial visual language. Cooper has to decide where to pull the stills
from his motion, Weber looks for a moment of confession, and even
Georgiou, who presents multiple takes on a time and place, edits from
hundreds more moments.
The Decisive Moment was a product of a particular time, when
newspapers and magazines were the primary outlet for photographers’
work, a medium through which they could speak to hundreds of thousands
of readers. And up until relatively recently that remained the case for
anyone with documentary concerns; photographers making their names on
smaller titles before hopefully working their way up to bigger
commissions on bigger and more prestigious publications.
But there are no big commissions these days, and few
photographers can earn a proper living making interesting work for
newspapers and magazines anymore. There simply isn’t the budget; a
situation that would seem to point to more straightened times, were it
for the fact that they are still prepared to pay huge sums for images of
celebrity. You can blame it on dumbing down, or the deep conservatism
of publishers, or the internet, which has helped drive down the price of
professional photography to unsustainable levels through the digital
distribution of cheap images.
For photographers the end of print is a reality, at least
regards to newspapers and magazines. (On the festival’s opening weekend,
Self Publish Be Happy will present a flourishing counter-trend,
showcasing the work of independent book publishers who still find vital
express in printed matter.) But these publications never really gave
them real freedoms to express their points of view, and in their
absence, photographers are searching for news ways to communicate with
audiences, free from the editorial confines of newspaper dictat.
Although they operate in uncertain times, these five
photographers present us with clear and articulate takes on the world.
And if such different voices and approaches can sit side-by-side so
easily, isn’t that a sign that photography is maturing, rather than a
medium in peril?
Simon Bainbridge
is the photography book by Henry Wessel. A video 
