On Tuesday the 9th of June we went to the Societe Jersiaise, to learn about the archive which can be seen as a visual history of Jersey. We then met the photographer in residence which was Tom Pope, who is a performance photographer. In Tom’s work he likes to push boundaries by doing something that is seen as socially unacceptable however isn’t against the law he does this in public spaces and wants to get audience’s participation.
One of the first activities we did with Tom Pope was, we got into pairs and throw an orange at each other with the aim of taking a photograph of the orange as close as possible to the camera. The main idea behind this activity wasn’t to necessarily get a good photograph of the orange but to show the performance/ act and push the boundaries of social acceptance. The second activity we did with Tom Pope was a ‘selfie war’ where in pairs you had to take as many selfies on your pairs camera while trying to stop your pair from doing the same thing but on your camera.
At the begging I struggled to understand why Tom was incorporating performance into photography, and how his short clips were seen as photography. By the end of his presentation I think I got a better understanding of why he was doing this as he explained the concepts behind each of his ideas.
