Exhibition Reflection
This post is to capture my reflections on the process of creating work for and exhibiting work in an exhibition around one topic/theme. This was the work required for semester one of my level five part of the degree in photography at the University Of Wolverhampton course.
In previous posts, Black Country Wander, Dudley Street Photography, Dudley Zoo – Shoot Two, Shoot Three – Dudley Zoo Again, Researching Architectural Photographers and Semester 1 – Week 6: West Brom Wander is lots of information about the photography project we were embarking on and the brief can be seen here: Response to The Brief
Not being from the Black Country I found it personally challenging, but not insurmountable so I had been out with my cameras to different places Halesowen, West Bromwich and Dudley which are undoubtedly areas in the Black Country region. Ironbridge, Wolverhampton and Birmingham are generally not considered part of the Black Country (B.C.) but it’s undeniable that the industrial lrevolution was a part of these areas too. One might even argue that the birthplace of the industrial revolution and thus the B.C. is Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale where the first major production of iron in foundries was achieved, before spreading further Eastwards.
Being a “foreigner” to the region, coming from Shropshire, I was unable to pull on my experiences of youth and growing up in the region as my fellow coursemates tended to do. I was limited by discovering what I could about the B.C. during the course of the study and photography shoots. I visited multiple towns and areas to take photos but I found a common ground between the B.C. project and my practice by visiting the Dudley Zoo and Castle which hold a series of important architectural listed buildings.
I took some photographs of the Tecton buildings in the Zoo grounds using colour and black and white film as well as different digital cameras and I came across the idea of using the Redscale film to capture the images for reasons mentioned in the previous posts, such as to invoke a heat and fire-light overcast to the images as if somehow the nearby foundries and metal processing plants were still influencing the area. The redscale film has a nostalgic feel without it being as cliche as sepia toning, and an almost unnerving fantastical edge to it almost as if post-apocalyptic. It’s also a tricky film to use as was proven by me having a fail on three rolls and having to go back and reshoot them in the rain. The challenge was also a worthwhile part of the project for me, I was having to use the internal lightmeter in the camera, an external sekonic lightmeter and even use a lightmeter app on my phone to try and judge the correct exposure time. As it happens, an extra two stops on what the meter suggested was the ideal exposure for me in this situation.
My Final Three (or Four)
The images I finally settled on were redscale photos of the concrete structures in the zoo, ones that had caught my eye and I hope might tweak the memory of people coming to see the photos into remembering their childhood experiences. I may not have been to Dudley before this project but I’m certain many people attending a Black Country themed exhibition will have been there in their younger years.
My first choice of image was one of the wavy concrete structure that sits above the turnstiles/payment entry booths of the zoo, which currently sit unused. I was struck by the edges of the concrete slabs that they did not just finish abruptly with a straight edge but featured special cast in features to act as a drain away for rain etc. The gaps between the concrete parts where the sky was visible through captured my imagination and the detail in the edges of the cast concrete slabs was also really beautiful. The redscale causes the obvious colour shift because the light hitting the film emulsion has been filtered somewhat by travelling through the orange plastic backing of the film, which due to the nature of the film sits in front of the emulsion. The sky was a little grey and featureless, the underside of the concrete a strange blue colour and the edges the usual concrete colours of brown, grey, and mossy green mixed together.
A true colour photo of a slightly different angle from a digital shot is featured below and without the redscale effect t does not have the same hold over my attention.
The second image I had chosen was of the underside of a structure near the polar bear enclosure, where there currently sits a vending machine, a bench and some toilets. The overhanging concrete protecting those standing underneath contains a series of perforations, through whihc you can see the sky above. My thought process behind this images was to capture the light pouring in through the holes of what would otherwise be a gloomy structure and the reflection on the cleverly placed glass of the windows that would also help disperse some of the light. The Orange cast of the concrete comes from this concrete being painted a light cream colour and the way that it interacts with the redscale film. You can see the area where this image was taken in the digital photo beneath.
The window at the very centre of the below image, behind the top rung of the fence is the glass to the left in the rescale photo. If you peer carefully you might make out the holes in the top edge of the concrete structure, slightly in front of the smaller rectangular series of windows. The redscale image could represent part of an industiral structure or process for the production of iron or coke as it is such a strange feature to have on a piece of zoo furniture like this, it’s not immediately obvious what the purpose of this series of holes is for.
Whilst this feature seems to serve no real purpose of use it seems from iterature around the architects involved and this series of forms that “these buildings at Dudley were made as controlled experiments so that the findings could be embodied in other Tecton buildings” and that “allowed the “appreciative public to understand the wider possibilities for architecture” (Coe and Reading, 1981). It might have been an architectural testbed to see what works, what doesn’t and how ideas can be translated into other structures in their future works. I like the mystery of an unknown feature, trying to develop theories as to why it might be there. Is it a skylight? a downspout for drainage? a place to store long poles or food? a handy feature to tie a hammock to? Who knows?
My third photo selected for the show was a part of the Bear Ravine, a structure that allowed the public to originally walk over the tops of other people and see into the ravine at the brown bears who used to be exhibited there. The overhead walkways are supported by mushroom topped monoliths according to Coe and Reading in their book Lubetkin and Tecton, Architecture and Social Commitment (1981) and a particular photo I captured took me back to a neolithic structure based in Salisbury, Stonehenge.
The top of the walkway reminded me of the lintel stones thatsit atop of the sarsen stones at the world famous landmark and with the redscale colouring effect I really liked the whole image. The woods in the background of the photo also allowed some mystery as though some ancient group of Britons had erected this to be found at a later date in the woods of the area.
The only problem with this being my third photo was that the first two were landscape orientation and this was a portrait style photo. Only when I’d printed out on A4 a draft did I realise that it might look strange to have a mixture of orientations. It just didn’t seem to look good. I looked for one of the next favourite images from the collection, one that I was happy with, that showed the concrete architecture and that might create a nostalgia for the viewers of the image. The below image was settled upon.
this photo shows the Kiosk #1 nearby the Bear Ravine from the portrait photo above. The concrete bar and elliptical concrete roof are visible along with the simple metal poles holding it up above the inner box structure. Originally used as kiosks for selling refreshments and sweets to visitors of the zoo these are now mainly used to hold “meet the animal” type events for people wandering around who might want to stroke a baby capybara or shake the tail of a small monkey. The image I captured though , I htink, has a fiery nature about it, wit the reflecting light off the shiny steel poles and white painted window frames almost reflecting the industrial ambience of the years previous. The small matrix of window frames is backed with a large poster of the kiosk in its glory days. In this other view you can see the kiosk draped in GRAYS DUDLEY banners and even a short stick of rock on the top of the roof all surrounded by around 60-70 people with their children all trying their luck at a challenge.
This redscaled kiosk would be my third image so it would line up with the other two landscape format prints. With this decided it was printing time and this is covered in a previous post .
Packaging and Transporting
After Christmas we returned on the first day back to pick up our prints, package them up for the journey to the Centrala gallery in Digbeth and then drive them over there.
Into the basement to see Euripides, Dan and Simon followed by Sam we were waiting to assist in the packing and couriering there was a gathering of deaf students from a local school or college come to do a workshop at the University. I am always amazed by different languages and sign language is jsut as intriguing to me. Amazing to see these young people taking on the challenges of the workshop.
We then went up to the ground floor storage room where the prints were being stored ahead of the exhibition, so we were given a roll of protective polystyrene film and some masking tape to wrap them in and got underway with the task. Rollout some protective sheet, wrap the picture up , tape the joins and then stack it on the bottom of the trolley. Repeating this over and over we soon completed the task and then took the pictures to the cars before heading back up to the print hub and the room next door where there were some more prints, mine included. We wrapped up all of these too, with a bit of a delay for a masking tape refill and then loaded these prints into the vehicles also.
After a quick 45 minute drive to get to the Minerva Works and Centrala within it’s bounds we made it there with three cars of prints, then once the door was open and the heating on, we carried them up the narrow stair case and into the space that would be the home of the work for the next week.
With the prints now safely in the space, we carefully unwrapped them and stood them around the edge of the room to take a look at the sequencing and positioning of the images.
Order, Order!
Carefully placing them on the floor at the foot of the walls, we were struck by how many images had made it into this area and the Centrala host Julia thought that it might not all fit on the walls. There were some discussions about the mix of having black and white and colour images separated from each other and then there were a number of smaller prints, some square also.
Discussing together the importance of having the centreline of the prints at 1.5m from the floor we set about calculating the dimensions that we’d need to be screwing into the wall at. It was tricky doing it in your head so I used some paper and a pencil to document some of the more important dimensions, although this didn’t prevent me from fouling up a couple of times. The distances from the centreline of the print to the place in the fixing on the rear of the frame was about 11cm up and the centre of each fixing was about 7cm from the edge of the print so we had to calculate this and then begin with the first print. We planned to have prints separated by a space of 5cm and prints by different photographers spaced out by 20cm although this would bite me in the arse later too.
Sam had brought his mains powered drill with him as we’d all got battery powered drills and the brick we started with was various hardnesses as we went along. We’d put up a couple of screws with rawl plugs and then check level of them, then put the print on, check the height of the dentre line was at 1.5m and then measure 5cm to the edge of the next print and repeat the operations ad infinitum. After a little while I left Callum and Sam alone as they were cracking on with the brick side, so Brian and I went to the boarded side where it was easier to fix screws to the wall. There was no drilling or rawl plugs required, just measure and then screw the screw into the wall using an impact driver. Easy peasy.
We started from the one end with a 20 cm gap from the wall and then followed the pattern across, making a few balls ups now and again, like forgetting to switch from landscapes to portrait dimensions for the middle two images. The height above the floor of 1.5m to the centre line was changing all over the place too, we’d be levelling up the screws across a whole wall and moving away from the first picture we hung, and the distance to the floor was waving about by up to three centimetres. It’s a good job we weren’t measuring the height of the screws from the floor entirely as it would have been like the Pepsi Max Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
We were getting close to the left-most end of the wall and it was getting late in the day too. Once I’d hung up the fourth to last print I noticed that we were running out of space. The pictures were laid on the floor leaning up against the wall and it looked like the last picture of my three would push the set too far to the left and there were still two further pictures to mount after that. A quick discussion was had and I offered to leave out my picture of the kiosk to allow more space for the last two prints but Sam was sure we could bunch up a few of the other images and save some space. This is what we did, we slid the images to be a little closer to each other on the left side of the pair of portrait format images in the middle and shrunk the 20cm gap to a little over 10 between my prints and the last pair and it jsut about paid off. The last print was so close to the end of the wall by the fire exit that I felt a little uncomfortable with it. If I’d been going back the next day I would have pulled everything up on the wall and had a bit of space after the last print, but I was at work all day so this was not possible. The two walls opposite each other were pretty well complete when we left, with a little bit of levelling left ot do on the Tuesday and the wall on the end to have a few prints mounted on it.
I set up my GoPro on a gorillapod and hung it from the ceiling to document the install which was captured and shared on the instagram later on.
The Opening
For Wednesday, the opening was at 6pm so I finished work at 3pm using up an hour and a quarter of holiday leave then rushed home, had a shower and picked up what I was taking with me to the exhibition. I left the house at around 3:30pm and got to the Centrala at around 5:30pm, traffic was a nightmare but I made it with a bit of time to spare. The others had been there a while and finsihed everything off and then gone to the pub so there was only Centrala staff and a few guests who ahad arrived early in the building, although they were held downstairs until the official opening. I placed out the Teddy Grays Pear Drops that I’d decanted into small bags the night before and then took photos of the works on the wall, which were all mounted and had their name tags also mounted with them. The place looked great.
There were cob rolls on the table of the usual flavours and a bunch of pork scratchings, a bar had also been set up in the corner near the posters for the exhibition synopsis and a load of tote bags that were available for free to exhibition visitors. Sam and my coursemates arrived at around 5:50pm and prepped for the opening, I remembered to also set up the gopro in the other corner to capture the traffic around the exhibition so it was now time to welcome people in.
People flooded up the stairs and were happily strolling around talking to the photographers and the tutors who were there supporting us. Then Gavin arrived with an insulated box containing battered chips or as they’re known in the B.C. “Orange Chips”, they proceeded to go down a storm with people getting their fill immediately. This regional food and the music playing out all being related to the B.C. gave a good ambience for the visitors to have a good wander around.
As the evening got underway it was nice to chat with my fellow coursemates about their work and how it looked on the wall. There were a few prints that I thought stood out above the rest, possibly because it was more to my taste and photography being subjective means that what I like, other people might not.
I particularly liked Joel’s image of the laminated wood in an abandoned building peeling off, I had to go and take a close look with my glasses on as I thought it looked like a collage. The detail in the image was outstanding and I’m pretty sure this was made with a film camera also.
Dani’s image of the interior of a derelict pub also features highly in my images of the exhibition, if not th e top overall. The detail in the dereliction and dilapidation is extraordinary and you can almost smell the dust and mould that become abundant in a run-down place like this.
The other of my selected few from the exhibition are from Long Cheung who goes by the anglicised name of Angus. His photos showed some chimneys from around the areas he’d walked and I really loved two of his photos for detailing the above eye level minutiae that people simply don’t notice.
About half an hour into the session I had a phone call from my wife who I had advised to park at Millenium Point/Thinktank as she was with my son and his girlfriend too. They were trying to walk to the gallery but the paths were all blocked off due to the works on the HS2 line. They had to walk all the way to Moor Street station before swinging around and heading to Digbeth that way. When they arrived they had a look around and a chat about the different work that they were seeing. My wife loved the pictures that Grace had made in the Black Country Living Museum. They loved examining the images on display but were confused by the simplicity of some of the photos, the car boot sale, market and football crowd images did not land well, but we had a chat about why these pictures are valuable and that they show the people that make up the Black Country, hence the title of the exhibition. Matter means stuff and these people, and places are what makes up the B.C. literally. My wife told me that she liked my picture of the Kiosk and another four people all said the same. They noticed the faces in the pictures of the window frames and it captured their imagination. This was the picture I would have dropped to make the others fit, and it was second choice after my Bear Ravine Henge photo, what do aI know..?
The wavy roof picture was also commented on by a couple of visitors and it is a characteristic I had noticed upon the printing of the photo. The way the gaps in the edges of the concrete roof seemed to overlap and to me it has a slight suggestion of a swastika. The swastika is a symbol that originated in India and the earliest version of the symbol is found on an item made 15,000 years ago. Whilst it has gained a negative (very negative) reputation in Europe owing to the appropriation of it by a genocidal maniac in the mid 20th Century, it is still widely used in many cultures around the world. Interesting that several people also made this connection with the picture. I suppose it’s a little like pareidolia where people see faces in images or clouds. The symbol is so recognisable that people might interpret other shapes to see it sometimes.
Some of us had a few prints that were available for purchase too on the opening night and I had five of each of my three prints in A4 size all prepped and in plastic sleeves ready to go, marked at £10 each there was no interest in my work until close to the end of the evening one of Gavin’s housemates, who happens to be an architect from Belgium, asked me for a copy of the wave print, the concrete wavy roof. I was only to happy to sell him a print and we had a discussion about the architecture of the zoo and the architect who had designed it. He then suggested that if I was looking for work in the future, once I’ve finished my degree that I could try local architect firms and offer to go and photograph finished projects with a different perspective. It was a really nice chat and I have looked aroudn to see how many architects are in my home town of Shrewsbury and there are many. He said that the print would be framed and mounted and on his wall at home, I felt honored. We also talked about my workplace, full time job in a factory, and he said that it would be great to photograph the factory, I told him I had already in my Shutdown project zine and we had a chat about factories too. Before we could go into any more conversations it was gone 8pm and the Centrala staff needed to get packed up and close off the upstairs.
I packed all of my unsold prints up and then grabbed my gopro from the top corner of the room before bagging everything, saying thanks to Sam for everything he’d done for us all and then I jumped in the car and headed back to Shrewsbury.
Reflecting
Overall, the exhibition was a great experience. Sam did an awful lot of the organisation that we had to do last year when preparing for the exhibition with Sylvia. Sam worked with the Centrala venue, organised the posters, social media presence, advertising and getting merch created too.
The printing and mounting of the work was also a new experience for me as last year I had sent off my work to be printed on acrylic. This year though we were all supposed to get the prints to be the same and on the same paper etc. I was really happy with my prints, but one of the images was smaller than the other two when I had mounted it. Some of the edges of the boards were also a little wobbly on other people’s images as if they were cut with a knife and straight edge, when an external company might use a large guillotine for super straight images.
The people who came to see the work were very complimentary about my work and some thought that I was using filters or and edited the pictures in post production to change the colours. They were interested when I explained about the redscale process too. I wondered to myself if a catalogue might have helped with the explanations of the works/series to the exhibition visitors. They different types of images may have confused people, and sometimes it can be better to leave it to the viewers own imagination, but there was little to tell film and digital photos apart and why some images meant more about the B.C. than they may have first appeared to.
The gallery of all the student’s work can be seen below as I captured it before the opening.
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