I am not Tom Pope, you are all Tom Pope

On the 28th of September my photography class went to visit Tom Pope’s exhibition which was held in St. Helier. We had previously studied Pope’s work as he was working as our Photographer in Residence. Through this project we explored the genre of performance photography incorporating the ideas of playfulness and chance. Pope also produced a body of work from his stay on the island, furthermore, he included photographs from the archive in order to bring the history of jersey into his work.

Pope’s exhibition reveals a great deal about his personality and the way he works. Pope had a combination of both videos and photographs; to begin he had a video on himself attempting to stack dice on top of each other. Pope framed his photographs with the colour orange simply because he liked the colour and it represented no significant meaning. Pope regularly engaged with the photographic archive and through this he devised a game called fragments. Players are drawn together through different social groupings and given a circular chip which they are asked to flip. Wherever this chip lands a disc is then cut out of the photograph and given to the player. I like this idea particularly because it uses the archive photographs but involves the concept of chance.

Tom Pope took the group around his exhibition explaining the meaning behind many of his photographs and videos. I think Pope’s work including the faces of the past is very clever and is most defiantly the favourite part of his body of work. Pope took the photographs from the archive of a range of different people and made the faces into masks. Pope looked through approximately 15,000 photographs from the Societe’s image archive. He then extended this project through taking the masks out into modern Jersey and get the public involved. This is an interesting and unique way of expanding the use of the Jersey Archive, it helps get people involved in the history of their island. A great deal of his work in this specific event was inspired by John Baldessari.

As part of the project, earlier on in the year Pope asked people to help him push a boat from Gorey Harbour to St. Ouen. He began the challenge at five thirty in the morning and was joined by composers who improvised songs along the way.