Art

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND PHOTOGRAPHY (MFA– WORK IN PROGRESS)

Artist's Statement

I am a victim of that 19th century invention that has gone on to become the most pervasive medium of the 20th and 21st centuries: Photography. From the late 1960s I have been recording the world around me with a camera: self, family, friends, environment, work, imaginative self. I have kept almost all of the films that I have shot. Some neatly filed and dated. Others just filed with only the information that the images might yield, if viewed now. Some of the people, circumstances and places are familiar to me. Others are mysterious or forgotten.

My interest in photography and in my archive of photographs had waned over the years until I started using a digital camera in the late 1990s. Using the 'film-less' camera had a surprising effect: it re-ignited my interest in photography and it made me curious about the content of all that exposed and processed film I had kept over the years, mostly unprinted, except for contact sheets and the odd print here and there.

When I decided to enter the 2003 Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award I looked to my archive for inspiration. As I did I became aware that most of my material was 'documentary' in nature. I found 7 photographs that particularly resonated with my life circumstances at the time.

They were images from the 1960s of my migrant family at their 'new' house. In 2003 my parents were still living in the same house, except that now my father had rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s. His loss of memory was a powerful creative trigger which helped me to re-purpose those 7 photographs. The images went on to win the Leica/CCP Award under a cloud of controversy. Leica wanted to pull the plug on the Award because my photographs were blurry and reflected badly on the image of Leica as a technically perfect camera system. The win and ensuing commotion strengthened my confidence that my archive may be well worth exploring to create further work. This research project aims to review the material in my archive and look for threads that chart my autobiography through my photographs. Can an autobiography be constructed solely with photographs and without words? That’s one of the many questions I am exploring as I work on my MFA titled: "A personal archive–navigating the self through the photographic image."

MC, 2009