Project framework: context, research questions, summary of research insights

Lisa and John (2018) brings together the three components of a multimedia output that revisited my photographic series Pictures from the Real World: Colour Photographs 1987–88. Published in book form in 2013, the original photographs were produced for my BA (Honours) final show while studying at West Surrey College of Art and Design (1985–88). They represented the lives of working-class families on the Osmaston housing estate, near the Rolls-Royce production plant in Derby. 

A 2013 exhibition of my work in Derby, coinciding with the publication of Pictures from the Real World, included images of Lisa and John and their children, who had featured strongly in my original project.  As a result of the show, Lisa contacted me and we began a series of discussions that ultimately led to a new “photographic” project. 

Rephotographing the family was never an option. Instead, alongside Lisa and John, I sought to revisit my original images, deconstructing and exploring them from various perspectives that kept faith with realism to produce: a set of theatrical maquettes; an immersive audio-visual installation; a verbatim play, with the couple played by actors. The real-life Lisa and John became active agents in a collaborative project that “opened up” Pictures from the Real World, questioning the original photographs and their discourse.

Context

Lisa and John can be seen as a work of Expanded Photography, where, as Lucy Soutter notes, “in all cases, the work pushes beyond photography’s traditional domains of the wall, the page and the screen, yet retains a deep connection to photography’s ideas and impulses“. 

My work as a student was influenced by the New British Colour Photography, itself a hybrid of European documentary and American colour practices, dovetailing with my own political consciousness. Pictures from the Real World was quickly acknowledged as part of the documentary canon, when two images chosen by Martin Parr were published by Creative Camera in 1988. The inclusion of images from the series in the 50th edition of Arles photography festival in 2019 confirms their relevance within a documentary canon. 

Much of my subsequent work has been an investigation into representation. Since the 1970s a tranche of critical theory has taken issue with documentary practice, progressively deconstructing the image to reveal concealed ideological anomalies and an unreliable belief in the medium as “truth”. 

The Lisa and John project offered an opportunity to investigate such ideas through the body of work I made in the 1980s and address some of these representational difficulties that had always been there, but to do so in collaboration with the family. 

Thirty years after the original series, Lisa and John uses collaboration and multimedia art forms to disrupt and challenge the paradigms of documentary practice, dismantling the conventional photographer/subject relationship and denying what Ariella Azoulay describes as a “finalised determination of knowledge”.

Key questions

Lisa and John proposes a transformative deconstruction of Pictures from the Real World, opening an inquiry centring on three questions: 

1 To what extent can the process of revisiting a series of documentary photographs in collaboration with the series’ former subjects shed light on the nature of representation? 

2 To what extent can other art forms contribute to a critical discussion of photographic practice? 

3 To what extent can performance and installation within a contextual reframing of an archive be used to shed light on that archive?

Summary of research insights

A collaborative and open-ended exploration of a photographic archive, via a variety of multimedia art forms, can illuminate normally concealed processes and assumptions underlying the production of realist works.